Soft skills and Jazz in Curriculum design

Continuous changing in educational trends and availability of mass qualified personnel has made tougher the competition for job acquisition and job sustainability. The focus of Higher Education Institutions has turned to the value of human capital and its ability to produce creative and independent leaders as a primary investment for future growth. To get an edge over the competitors, students are left with no choice but to add value to their hard skills with soft skills to exhibit their true potential. Hard skills are academic skills, experience and level of expertise, while soft skills are self-developed, interactive, communicative, human and transferable skills. In this article, the authors present a methodological intervention used during a summer school, in which, behind the jazz metaphor the authors discuss suggestions for improving methods and materials, and why this practice can generate an authentic human development.