ABSTRACT
The implementation of soft skills in higher education appears to vary depending on the political, socioeconomic and cultural factors of a country and the educational values of the university. Therefore, this chapter will lay a context background on the current soft-skills deficit among Vietnamese graduates, arguing that such a situation will hinder the socioeconomic and cultural development that the country has sustained for almost two decades. It will then shift to depicting the contemporary context of the HE system where soft skills have been implemented under the regulation of the Ministry of Education and Training for approximately a decade. It also depicts the competition of implementation with several reforms concurrently taking place in the HE system. Generally, the chapter argues that there is a severe shortage of soft skills in graduates, that this has been caused by many ingrained factors, and the implementation of soft skills in Vietnamese universities has been lost among other important academic and administrative reforms in the HE system.
