Cut-throat and immature antics on NBC's reality show The Apprentice aside, most CEOs don't want employees – even top employees – to be thoughtless jerks.

Although workers with harder-edge attributes like competitiveness and risk-taking might be able to bring in the big bucks in the short-term, if no one can stand to work with them, it doesn't benefit the company much in the long-term. This is something that technical and business schools should teach students just as thoroughly as the technical skills, according to Canada's CEOs.

A book released by the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance (CATA) in 2005 titled Success, asked more than 100 Canadian business leaders what they thought were the most important leadership skills in the workplace. The top attributes were mentorship and leadership followed by vision, entrepreneurship and communications capability. This is invaluable information to students looking to land their dream job.

"The things that students are missing out on when the certificates are handed out are lessons in soft skills that actually make a business person who they are. The technological skills are relatively easy to learn, but the soft skills are what make you a business leader," said Barry Gander, vice president of CATA and author of Success.

Brent Thomson, a co-managing partner of Peak Sales Recruiting, has 18 years of experience in sales leadership and has seen first hand how demands from CEOs are changing.

"We're not seeing too many organizations that don't look for both hard and soft skills. They have a defined culture and value system and they have to find people that are a good fit with the organization," said Mr. Thomson.

"Just the other day we were told by a woman in HR that a candidate who was sent to her was technically skilled, but they had to decline the person the hiring manager wanted because he wasn't a good fit."

David Perry of executive recruiting firm Perry-Martel International said these personality traits are especially important for new job seekers with little experience to market to employers.

"When you come out of school are you packaging yourself for the job market as a commodity or a value add? That's a serious question because if 700 students come out of the same program and they all have similar work experience, what's the differentiator? Your soft skills make the difference," he said.

"There are five things employers will pay for. They include leadership skills, project management skills, people skills, communication skills and sales skills. Notice they're all soft skills. Everything else (like technical skills) everyone else has too!"

Most people tend to think that "natural born leaders" and "people persons" have innate characteristics that one either has or they don't. Not so, said Mr. Gander.

"People don't realize soft skills are learnable. Charisma and the ability to be a leader is something you can develop, you are not born with it," he said.

Peter Koppel, vice dean and head of student services and the career centre at the University of Ottawa's School of Management, said that times have changed and the way people skills are taught has changed as well.

"The degree shows you have the capability to learn, but it's all the others things that are really important on a day-to-day basis. Something like 85 per cent of your day is dealing with other people, so you have to be able to relate. The way society has moved has necessitated this program," Mr. Koppel said.

To address this concern, for the past three years Carleton University Sprott School of Business and the University of Ottawa School of Management have offered students the opportunity to attend the Mindtrust Leadership Development Program. Through Mindtrust, a CEO-exclusive networking forum, Ottawa CEOs conduct seminars for business, engineering, computer science and technology students. Topics include group process skills, overcoming leadership challenges, communications and leadership management.

"We also have a career centre for management students financed by the management students," Mr Koppel. "So we teach things like interviewing, stress management, time management, networking. Our students are differentiated in that they have the skills that other students don't have. Our students appear to be better prepared and able to deal with situations."

Mr. Koppel said leadership skills also come from those who will question everything and explore new ideas and angles, which is a new concept. "Things are different than they were a few decades ago. In my generation, we were told to jump and we said 'how high?' This generation is told to jump and they say 'why?' It's extremely competitive out there right now," he said. "(The Mindtrust) program, I think, is putting us on the leading edge. Since we were AACSB (the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) accredited in 2003, we've looked into other new programs and tried to learn the best practices. Personal development is extremely important to have students understand who they are and what their skills are and building on those strengths."