Soft Skills Formed Through Online Education—Are They Sufficiently Developed for Economics Graduates’ Integration into the Labour Market?

The COVID-19COVID-19 pandemicEconomics graduates has subjectedSoft skills the world to a process of adaptationAdaptation to new rules, restrictionsRestrictions and a new lifestyle. Education was not left out of this trend, imposing changes in the dimensions of teaching, learning and assessment. In the context where the future of the labour marketLabour market is built with the contribution that the educational system brings to the personality and training of each individual, in addition to hard skillsHard skills, the developmentDevelopment of soft skillsSoft skills is vital in ensuring professional success. Under the conditions of the limitation of human interactions during the pandemic, the question arises in which way or at what level these soft skillsSoft skills were developed, when by their very nature some of them (such as teamwork, effective communicationCommunication, negotiation, conflict managementConflict management) are closely related to the human factor and the relational dimension?. Based on these considerations, the present work aims to highlight the contribution of online educationOnline education to the development of soft skillsSoft skills among students from universities in western RomaniaRomania. In this sense, starting from the content analysis of specialized reports in the field, we conducted a survey among the direct beneficiaries of online educational services, aiming to study their perception regarding the role of online education in the formation of soft skillsSoft skills.