Interpersonal Skills Including Communication Skills for CSAT

Interpersonal Skills Including Communication Skills is a topic for CSAT ( General Studies Paper 2 – Civil Service Prelims Exam). But candidates who appear for Preliminary Exam, often seem to be unaware about this topic. Before getting into the details of Interpersonal Skills, lets analyze the syllabus for Civil Service Prelims Paper 2.

Syllabus for Civil Service Prelims Paper 2

Comprehension
Interpersonal skills including communication skills
Logical reasoning and analytical ability
Decision making and problem solving
General mental ability
Basic numeracy (numbers and their relations, orders of magnitude etc.) (Class X level), Data interpretation (charts, graphs, tables, data sufficiency etc. -Class X level)
English Language Comprehension skills (Class X level).Questions relating to English Language Comprehension skills of Class X level (last item in the Syllabus of Paper-II) will be tested through passages from English language only without providing Hindi translation thereof in the question paper.

Interpersonal skills including communication skills : What to study?

So, it is clear from UPSC syllabus that there is a separate topic called Interpersonal Skills. Let’s have a quick look at what are the interpersonal skills a person need to have.

Interpersonal skills:

Interpersonal Skills are also known by the names soft skills or people skills. These are skills which you need while you deal with people, for better and healthy results. A master of interpersonal skills knows how to deal with different people during different situations.

Basic Interpersonal skills can be briefed as below

Communication Skills
Listening Skills
Stress Management
Assertiveness
Decision Making
Problem Solving
Verbal Communication
Non-Verbal Communication

Interpersonal skills including communication skills and UPSC

Those who expected Sentence Correction, Fill up the blank – grammar/language questions or Para-jumbles as there is a term called ‘communication skill’ in syllabus – were disappointed by UPSC, by not asking any questions from these areas at all. There were no questions in Interpersonal skills section, but questions came coupled with decision making and problem solving – as you can see these two are also inseparable part of Interpersonal skills.

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Having said that, it doesn’t mean UPSC will stick to the same type of questions in future too. They can go for language skill testing questions, but that may put students from rural background at a disadvantage, and that’s probably the main reason why UPSC has not tried those areas directly in question paper.

As of now for solving the Decision making and problem solving section, best answer is often derived by using the interpersonal skills too, and that’s what UPSC expects from future Civil Servants.