History
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 1972Concept
Soft skills are personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively. These skills can include social graces,Versus hard skills
“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.Measurement
Studies by theEducation
Because of their rising importance, the need to teach soft skills has become a major concern for educators and employers all over the world. Because soft skills are poorly defined, teaching them is more challenging, compared to classical skills. For this reason, the first step consists of understanding how to evaluate them, so that educators can track student progress. As for teaching, evaluating soft skills is harder than technical skills. “Quizzes or exams cannot accurately measure interpersonal and leadership skills”. Group projects seem to be a good way to develop soft skills, but evaluating them still represents a hard obstacle. Researchers consider peer evaluation a good compromise between working in groups and an objective evaluation. The researches conducted on this topic reported both positive and negative results. The study carried out by professor Zhang of Georgia Southern University, although with few participants, “is an initial step in designing and validating a peer assessment scale”. “The development of soft skills is much more difficult than the development of hard skills because it requires actively interacting with others on an ongoing basis and being willing to accept behavioral feedback”. While hard skills can be learned studying from a book or from individual training, soft skills needs a combination of environment and other people to be mastered. For this reason, learning doesn't depend solely on the person, but it is influenced by different factors that make the education harder and unpredictable. Training transfer, “defined as the extent to which what is learned in training is applied on the job and enhances job-related performance”, is another reason why the education of soft skills is hard. “Prior research and anecdotal evidence has emphasized that soft-skills training is significantly less likely to transfer from training to job than hard-skills training”. This forces companies and organizations to invest more money and time in training, and not all are willing to do it. The OECD ‘'Future of Education and Skills 2030’' report released in 2019 highlighted the growing importance of soft skills in education due to trends such as globalization and rapid advancements in technology and artificial intelligence, which demand changes of the labor market and the skills future workers require in order to succeed. It says, "to remain competitive, workers will need to acquire new skills continually, which requires flexibility, a positive attitude towards lifelong learning and curiosity". Research has been conducted investigating the transfer of soft skills and knowledge through formats such as play (DeKorver, Choi and Town, 2017) as well as project-based learning (Lee and Tsai, 2004). Another key finding from the literature is that in order to maximize benefits of soft skills over the long-term, they should be focused on young children particularly from the age of 1 – 9 years old. Nobel prize winners Heckman and Kautz (2012) provided evidence of this in their analysis of the Perry Preschool Soft Skills program, where they found how personality traits can be changed in ways that produce beneficial life outcomes. The program involved teaching social skills to 3 and 4-year-old children from low income black families with initial IQ scores below 85 at age 3. 128 children participated in the four year high-quality preschool education program which emphasized active learning. The children were involved in activities designed to develop their decision making and problem solving skills and that were planned, executed and reviewed by the children themselves with support from adults. Teachers also paid weekly 1.5 hour visits to each student's home to involve the mother in the educational process and help implement the preschool curriculum at home. This longitudinal study was evaluated using randomized controlled trials (RCT). It was found that the group which experienced the enrichment preschool program compared to the control group which didn't participate had significantly more positive life outcomes than their peers by the age of 40. This included that 60% of the program group earned more per year (over US$20,000) as compared to the 40% that the non-program group. In addition, 77% of the program group graduated high school whereas only 60% of the non-program group graduated. Other life outcomes included program school participants were less likely to get arrested, owned their own home and car and had fewer teenage pregnancies (Heckman and Kautz, 2012). Evidence from other studies are consistent with the findings from the Perry Preschool Program, such as data from Project STAR (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio) carried out by Krueger and Whitmore (2001) and Project PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies) that teaches self-control, emotional awareness and social-problem skills aimed at elementary school children (Bierman et al., 2010). Both studies have found implementing soft skills education to small groups of children at a young age have led to significantly higher wages in early adulthood compared to their peers and other lifetime successes (Dee and West, 2011; Durlak et al., 2011).Metacognition
The same OECD report emphasized the importance of metacognitive skills for lifelong learning. Metacognition amounts to thinking about one's thinking. More specifically, it refers to the processes used to assess one's understanding. It includes critical thinking, reflection, and awareness of oneself as a thinker and a learner (Chick, 2013). With increasing automation, purely cognitive or professional skills no longer suffice to navigate this VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) (Yeo, 2019, OECD 2015.Employment
According to the OECD's Skills Outlook 2019 report, life-long learning orCriticism
While "soft skills" have become increasingly taught in educational programs worldwide, some scholars have shown the inconsistent usage of the term, as well as the ways it is used to control, rather than empower, employees. Deborah Cameron, for example, shows that the growing focus on "communication" skills among service providers in the UK has limited workers' forms of expression and produced uniform conversational codes. Kori Allan demonstrates that state-run integration programs for new immigrants in Canada, employ the focus on soft skills so that individuals adopt the interpersonal cultural norms of Canadian society. In China, the Ministry of Education has sought to promote students' self-expression and communicational skills at the expense of exam-driven learning, yet the difficulty in measuring these abilities, and moreover the fact that these abilities are more easily identified among the urban elite rather than democratically accessible, has curtailed much of these efforts. As Gil Hizi shows, rather than being treated as objectively recognized abilities necessary for the job market, people in China who foster soft skills regard themselves as becoming more individualistic and cosmopolitan in contrast to the demands of their local culture.See also
External links
References
◦ Brieuc du Roscoät, Romaric Servajean-Hilst, Sébastien Bauvet and Rémi Lallement(2022), Soft skills related to innovation and organizational transformation. How to act in uncertainty?, Institut pour la transformation et l’innovation, March 2022 https://www.strategie.gouv.fr/english-articles/soft-skills-innovate-and-transform-organizationsFurther reading
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Soft Skills Sociological terminology Life skills 1970s neologisms Social graces