ABSTRACT
This chapter compares the soft-skills implementation of two non-public Vietnamese universities which used a similar institutional implementation strategy but experienced different results. Content analysis of relevant documents and interviews with 20 leaders, faculties, and staff members in the two universities revealed that both conceptualized the implementation as developing work-readiness skills for students. To translate the concept into practice, a work-integrated learning approach was adopted to train students in the selected soft skills. However, differences in levels of curriculum autonomy, the effectiveness of leadership, connections with industry, and the use of extracurricular activities resulted in disparities in the achievements of the implementation objectives. Findings indicate that to ensure success in soft-skills implementation, each university needs to analyze their institutional context, devise a feasible implementation strategy, and use effective leadership to implement tasks instead of replicating an implementation model reported to be successful somewhere else.
