We are embarking on a journey into the world of Soft Skills in collaboration with the PEOPLE platform, whose mission is to help today's young people understand how to acquire the competencies necessary to be successful professionals, digital citizens, and individuals in continuous growth. The platform has developed its 'People Skills' from soft skills, aiming to support companies in enhancing performance, optimizing processes and people, and improving the work environment.
Before diving into the world of soft skills, it is important to ask a preliminary question: what are soft skills, and do they matter? Does it make sense for young people to invest money and time in improving them from the outset?
In a world that is constantly evolving, soft skills have become essential for both personal and professional success. There is still no unanimous definition of soft skills or even an exhaustive list of them, but usually, this term refers to cross-cutting abilities that relate to the human and relational aspects of individuals, and are increasingly accompanying hard skills, which are technical knowledge developed in academic and professional courses.
Nowadays, soft skills are talked about everywhere as the latest frontier of innovation, as the latest discovery that research has given us. We're sorry to destroy this image, but things are different. While it is true that the term "soft skills" has only recently entered the common language and mass culture, their importance in the quality of professional and personal life has been recognized for decades. Research conducted by Harvard University, the Carnegie Foundation, and the Stanford Research Center has concluded that 85% of work success depends on having developed soft skills. These statistics were extrapolated from a study conducted by Mann and published by the Carnegie Foundation more than a hundred years ago, in 1918.
This understanding is rooted in our history, and we must recover this awareness to avoid the dichotomy between worker and person that has plagued us for centuries. We are people, human beings even and especially when we work, as we serve our community.
Forgetting this means forgetting who we are and leaving the door open to many possible degenerations, as we have seen in history.
For this reason, while the term soft skills help us to orient ourselves, we must always keep in mind what an article from the WEF reminds us of, commenting on a survey conducted by LinkedIn among HR professionals, when it says that the term "soft skills" barely does justice to the complex combination of abilities it describes: empathy, emotional intelligence, creativity, collaboration, adaptability, communication, to name just a few. These abilities make us who we are as individuals and human beings, and we should invest much more in them than we do now. There are many reasons why today's and future workers should invest in soft skills.
To summarize, we list below the three main ones:
Preparing for the future: With the advent of automation and artificial intelligence, many technical skills will become obsolete over time. Investing in soft skills helps develop competencies that will be increasingly valuable and sought after because they are specific to human beings, such as critical thinking and creativity.
Increasing job satisfaction: soft skills help create a more positive and collaborative work environment, where employees feel valued and stimulated. This can lead to greater job satisfaction and a better quality of life.
Improving career opportunities: soft skills are increasingly required by employers in different sectors, improving career opportunities.
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