Soft skills are an important component of nursing. However, it is often found in job applicants’ lack of soft skills such as communication and problem-solving. Higher education should develop character values for its students, develop soft skills, or develop non-academic components because, in fact, educational institutions still focus on cognitive and academic aspects. The development of hard skills has a greater portion of learning than soft skills. So, education institutions need to pay attention to developing strategies such as self-directed learning during clinical placement to develop both hard and soft skills. This study assesses the effectiveness of self-directed learning methods in clinical placement on nursing students’ soft skills. This research adopted a quasi-experimental procedure with a before-and-after control group method with a sample size of 96 in Surakarta, Indonesia. The sample was divided into two groups: 48 respondents in group SDL; and 48 respondents in control group. The results showed that self-directed learning affects soft skills with a p-value of 0.00 (p <0.05). This finding is helpful to clinical teachers and clinical instructors in developing learning methods in clinical placement. Institutions of higher education can use these findings as evidence to enhance students’ soft skills by implementing these methods in clinical placement.