Soft skills of the Tutor

Persons who support learning in virtual environments, need special characteristics which are of special significance for the work of an eTutor next to specific technical, technological and didactic/methodical knowledge, abilities and capabilities. This is also concerning the area of emotional intelligence. This means qualities such as the consciousness and the control of own feelings, capacity for understanding other people and the ability to steer own emotions.

This kind of intelligence relies on the five elements: 

self-consciousness

motivation

self- regulation

empathy

social capabilities

Emotional intelligence ...

is focused on the working area of an eTutor and it becomes clear that he, as with any teaching activities, should first and foremost take pleasure in communicating with other people. He has to be capable of approaching people openly and without prejudice and to deal with other characters.

He also has to be able to estimate and judge behaviour and characteristics of other people. This again requires a high amount of empathy in order to be able to understand problems, sorrows and fears of participants and to work against those.

... and again communication ...

An e-Tutor should also dispose of very good communication abilities. These are absolutely necessary for the undisturbed information exchange between the two sides because clear and precise formulation of the tutor helps preventing misunderstandings and avoiding un-necessary delays.

The area of communication abilities does especially include the area of written expression capabilities, next to the ability to orally express oneself within audio and video conferences. This is because a big part of an eTutor’s time is taken up by written exchanges with participants’ problems, i.e. he answers e-mails, corrects homework, chats, works on news groups/forums or elaborates participant.

... and maybe stress - resistant

In order to hold out the psychological demands of this profession, the tutor has to be able to handle stress and has to have a corresponding frustration tolerance, meaning the ability to handle problems and set-backs .