  Is it possible to measure how critical soft skills like leadership or
teamwork are from the viewpoint of graduate studies offerings? This paper
provides a conceptual and methodological framework that introduces the concept
of a bipartite network as a practical way to estimate the importance of soft
skills as socio-emotional abilities trained in graduate studies. We examined
230 graduate programs offered by 49 higher education institutions in Colombia
to estimate the empirical importance of soft skills from the viewpoint of
graduate studies offerings. The results show that: a) graduate programs in
Colombia share 31 soft skills in their intended learning outcomes; b) the
centrality of these skills varies as a function of the graduate program,
although this variation was not statistically significant; and c) while most
central soft skills tend to be those related to creativity (i.e., creation or
generation of ideas or projects), leadership (to lead or teamwork), and
analytical orientation (e.g., evaluating situations and solving problems), less
central were those related to empathy (i.e., understanding others and
acknowledgment of others), ethical thinking, and critical thinking, posing the
question if too much emphasis on most visible skills might imply an unbalance
in the opportunities to enhancing other soft skills such as ethical thinking.
