The Government College University Lahore has initiated a series of life skills workshops to equip its students with soft skills they need to get through life’s ups and downs. The programme has adopted three skills as its core focus: critical thinking skills, social interaction skills and emotional intelligence. The first workshop in the series was held here at GCU on the “Art of Conversation” that focuses on verbal and non-verbal communications, barriers in conversations, handling difficult situations and micro-skills of impressive conversation. Addressing the opening ceremony of the workshop, Vice Chancellor Prof. Dr. Asghar Zaidi said: “We are equipping our students with the necessary skills to become highly competitive in the global market. When we discuss as to how to make our bright students better than the students at topmost universities of the world, I have identified one issue: lack of communication skills, and that is the focus of the first workshop”. The Vice Chancellor said most of GCU students come from a middle or lower middle class where life skills were unfortunately ignored in their schooling. “It makes them socially awkward in modern academic and professional settings, so we will be making life skills workshops a permanent feature of learning at GCU, often during the zero semester arrangements”, he observed.