Soft Skills
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Wikipedia
Soft skills, also known as power skills, common skills or core skills, are skills applicable to all professions. These include critical thinking, problem solving, public speaking, professional writing, teamwork, digital literacy, leadership, professional attitude, work ethic, career management and intercultural fluency. This is in contrast to hard skills, which are specific to individual professions.
The word “skill” highlights the practical function. The term alone has a broad meaning, and describes a particular ability to complete tasks ranging from easier ones like learning how to kick a ball to harder ones like learning to be creative. In this specific instance, the word “skill” has to be interpreted as the ability to master hardly controlled actions.
The term “soft skills” was created by the U.S. Army in the late 1960s. It refers to any skill that does not employ the use of machinery. The military realized that many important activities were included within this category, and in fact, the social skills necessary to lead groups, motivate soldiers, and win wars were encompassed by skills they had not yet catalogued or fully studied. Since 1959, the U.S. Army has been investing a considerable amount of resources into technology-based development of training procedures. In 1968 the U.S. Army officially introduced a training doctrine known as “Systems Engineering of Training” covered in the document CON Reg 350-100-1.
PG Whitmore cited the CON Reg 350-100-1 definition: “job-related skills involving actions affecting primarily people and paper, e.g., inspecting troops, supervising office personnel, conducting studies, preparing maintenance reports, preparing efficiency reports, designing bridge structures.”
In 1972, a US Army training manual began the formal usage of the term “soft skills”. At the 1972 CONARC Soft Skills Conference, Dr. Whitmore presented a report aimed at figuring out how the term “soft skills” is understood in various CONARC schools. After designing and processing a questionnaire, experts formulated a new tentative definition: “Soft skills are important job-related skills that involve little or no interaction with machines and whose application on the job is quite generalized.”
They further criticized the state of the concept then as vague with a remark “in other words, those job functions about which we know a good deal are hard skills and those about which we know very little are soft skills.” Another immediate study by them also concluded in a negative tone.
Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey famously stated that social intelligence, rather than qualitative intelligence, defines humans. Many industries today give prominence to the soft skills of their employees. Some companies now offer professional training of soft skills to their employees.
Soft skills are a cluster of productive personality traits that characterize one’s relationships in a social environment. These skills can include social graces, communication abilities, language skills, personal habits, cognitive or emotional empathy, time management, teamwork and leadership traits. A definition based on review literature explains soft skills as an umbrella term for skills under three key functional elements: people skills, social skills, and personal career attributes.
The importance of soft skills lies in the fact that they are not restricted to a specific field. These thinking dispositions consist of a group of abilities that can be used in every aspect of people’s lives, without any need to readapt them based on the situation. Their ductility helps “people to adapt and behave positively so that they can deal effectively with the challenges of their professional and everyday life”. Soft skills make people flexible in a world which keeps changing.
Interest in soft skills has increased over the years. The more research that is conducted, the more people understand the relevance of this concept. The huge amount of fund companies and worldwide organizations are investing in the training and development of this field shows this interest. The European Commission launched the program Agenda for new skills and jobs in 2012 in order to train and explain to young adults this new set of skills.
In the 21st century, soft skills are a major differentiator, a sine qua non for employability and success in life. The Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman claims that “soft skills predict success in life, that they casually produce that success, and that programs that enhance soft skills have an important place in an effective portfolio of public policies”. The significance employers give to the topic is shown by the fact that soft skills are now as important as GPA (once considered the most important factor in making decisions) in hiring a new worker.
The high request, and the broadly diffused confusion about the meaning and the training of soft skills represent two elements that can explain the lack of soft skills in the job market. Employers struggle to find leaders and worker able to keep up with the evolving job market. The problem is not limited to young people who are looking for a job, but also for actual employees. A 2019 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management found that three-quarters of employers have a hard time finding graduates with the soft skills their companies need.
“Hard skills include technical or administrative competence”. Soft skills are commonly used to “refer to the “emotional side” of human beings in opposition to the IQ (Intelligent Quotient) component related to hard skills”. Hard and soft skills are usually defined as similar concepts or complements. This fact demonstrates how these two different types of abilities are strictly related.
Hard skills were the only skills necessary for career employment and were generally quantifiable and measurable from an educational background, work experience or through interview. Success at work seemed to be related solely to the technical ability of completing tasks. For this reason, employer and companies used to hire new people based only on their objective competencies. This clarifies why nowadays people with good soft skills are in such shorter supply than workers with good hard skills.
The trend has changed in the last years, in part due to more businesses adopting a hybrid work environment. Hard skills still represent a fundamental aspect, but soft skills equaled them for importance. According to the leadership professor Robert Lavasseur, most of the researchers he interviewed in this field “rated soft skills higher than technical skills”. Studies by Stanford Research Institute and the Carnegie Mellon Foundation among Fortune 500 CEOs confirm this idea establishing that 75% of long term job success resulted from soft skills and only 25% from technical skills (Sinha, 2008). Another study found that 80% of achievements in career are determined by soft skills and only 20% by hard skills.
In employment sectors that have seen rapid growth, employers have stated that newly graduated employees possess a skill gap. This skill gap resides between soft and hard skills, these newly graduated employees possess the hard skills required and expected, but are lacking the soft skills.