The soft skills revolution: Do we know what we are talking about?

Soft skills develop and evolve through communal understandings of the workplace and ways of working.

First published in The Mandarin

It’s not hard to find a statistic showing that soft skills are essential. When things go wrong, say 89% of recruiters, it’s down to a lack of soft skills. Sagely, 57% of leaders say that soft skills are more important than hard skills. The demand for soft skills has increased over the past five years, according to 83% of HR professionals.

The APS workforce strategy recognises the crucial role of soft skills for future leaders, ‘such as the ability to engage with multiple stakeholders and effectively mobilise diverse teams’. The strategy is silent on the what and how soft skills beyond that.

But when we say ‘soft skills’, do we all understand what we are talking about?

AI-powered soft skills revolution

Unsurprisingly, as humans continue to search for their place in a world inhabited by AI-empowered bots, there has been a resurgence of interest in soft skills as a unique contribution of humans to the workplace: the ability to navigate tricky emotional ground, collaborate with people who don’t want to cooperate, and find solutions to complex problems.

The gist seems that human creativity will be harnessed to develop breakthrough innovation once free from the day-to-day struggle of process work.

At the same time, AI entrepreneurs are working hard to ‘democratise creativity’ so anyone can write a song or design a building. If they are successful, human creativity in the workplace may not be the special and unique skill we believe it to be.

The optimists describe the potential of new technologies to augment human work, opening up new opportunities for more people to engage in better-quality work. It is not about replacing people with thinking machines, say the optimists, but finding opportunities to work together to enhance performance. AI will always be weak without the human capability to understand a new context, analyse it, and share its meaning with others. The pessimists are not convinced.

Technological optimists searching for the human-in-the-loop are driving the revolution in soft skills. However, the assertion feels thin when the definition of what is and isn’t a soft skill is loose and changeable. For example, the list of necessary soft skills is often a mix of traits, competencies, and abilities. There are also questions about whether or not soft skills are trainable.

What is a skill?

What constitutes a skill has been debated in psychology, philosophy, education, engineering, neuroscience, and sports science, and agreement has yet to be reached.

The general theme is that performing a skill to an agreed standard takes practice and experience. A skill implies having access to specialist knowledge, processes, or sequences of behaviour that lead to an action.

The problems start when we distinguish between hard and soft skills. Driving a car might be considered a measurable ‘hard skill’ performed to a standard. It is a skill acquired through instruction and practice. However, a skilled road user develops soft skills that improve driving performance over time.

Soft skills are described as personal and interpersonal abilities essential to the task’s performance. The list often includes behaviours associated with emotional intelligence, communication, problem-solving, team building, and self-control skills like stress management. Soft skills are acquired through experience and require self-reflection.

The separation between soft and hard skills does little to reduce the ambiguity in defining skills or finding a place for humans in the workplace.

A culture of skills

We have fallen into the trap of making a laundry list of future skills based on highly speculative assertions about future job titles like ‘metaverse and virtual reality systems planner’ and ‘human-machine team manager’.

Skill develops and evolves through communal understandings of the workplace and ways of working. Skills are transferred culturally through interactions between people and by adapting existing skills to a changing physical environment or spatial culture.

The shift to remote and hybrid working was an example of this process in action. New skills to manage communication and productivity were developed through people interacting with each other and transferring knowledge. The change in spatial culture of work from location-based to fully remote to hybrid has seen the rapid adaptation of existing skills to a new context.

Those making myopic demands to return to fully office-based work need to recognise this learning and understand that not only is there no going back, but that the soft skills so in demand by senior leaders have undergone a period of rapid adaptation and enhancement.

Understanding that skills are embedded in an evolving culture highlights that skills have a social meaning in development and application. Consequently, skills will continue to defy rigid definitions. Ambiguity will persist because skills (hard and soft) are embedded in workplace contexts.

Craft is a culture of skills

To better understand skills and the unique contribution humans make to work in an AI-powered (or even quantum-powered) age, we might work with an idea the Australian Public Service (APS) has embraced: craft.

The idea of craft carries within it the journey from novice to master. It connects performance with context. It emphasises that skills are embedded in a social context. Craft brings together skill, judgment, culture, and ethics.

A craft is more than an arbitrary list of skills. It embodies people’s innate capacity to understand and interact with the world around them. Craft learning works with the past and the future by focusing on three capabilities. People need to be able to:

• Acquire information, think and solve problems, and understand the world.

• Know that preferred patterns of actions and choices have been developed through trial and error over time. (There is no need to re-learn every skill from first principles.)

• Build and maintain relationships with others. Understanding and empathising with others is essential to participating in a community.

Working with a list of skills treats learning as a performative box-ticking exercise. Resume-building becomes the focus of learning rather than expertise and performance.

Craft is the direct opposite. Learning is the core activity of work, focusing on continuously reinventing expertise and performance. This is the ‘culture of continuous learning’ many leaders aspire to create.

Rethinking workplace learning

Our fascination with listing skills shortages or forecasting the skills that will be required in the future has become a fetish. It skews our conversation about learning by focusing on the ‘what’ and ‘how’. It presupposes a specific ‘why’ for investing in learning: closing a skills gap.

Given the persistence of skills gaps (hard and soft), leaders must question whether they are sufficiently investing in education and training and, perhaps more systemically, whether the education and training provided are adequate.

Craft offers a different (an older) way of approaching learning and development. This will significantly depart from current practice in most public and private sector organisations.

There are open questions about how the craft works at scale, but these are technical problems to be solved by people working together with intent. Today, we treat learning like a shot periodically given to protect us in a changing workplace. However, this shot approach is insufficient in a working life that could extend past 60 years.

A craft approach treats learning as a continuous activity that evolves with the person and the context. It is more than ticking a list of soft and hard skills.

If the APS wants to create a ‘culture of continuous learning’, leaders must accept and embrace learning as a core responsibility.