The soft skills gap: ignoring stats for 100 years

In 2016 a group of researchers from Harvard University, the Carnegie Foundation and Stanford Research Center extrapolated statistics from “A Study of Engineering Education”, authored by Charles Riborg Mann and published in 1918. 

They concluded that 85% of job success comes from having well-developed soft and people skills, and only 15% of job success comes from technical skills and knowledge, i.e. hard skills. 

Mann’s research was conducted only five years after Henry Ford installed the first assembly line for the mass production of a complete car. Cross-industry automation was still far in the future, let alone computer automation or Artificial Intelligence! As I discussed in a blog post a few weeks ago, the advanced automation we are seeing now will only increase the need for soft skills.

Fast forward to 2018

So what do businesses find important? Let’s have a look 100 years later. LinkedIn recently surveyed 2,000 business leaders and asked them which soft skills they’d most like to see their employees learn.

Here’s what they listed as the most in-demand skills soft skills:

1. Leadership
2. Collaboration
3. Communication
4. Time management

That looks pretty universal, doesn’t it? I can’t imagine that list being very different in 2118.

As long as not every single human is replaced by a robot, we’ll need good managers who are able to cope with change and the constantly evolving workplace. More efficient processes will require more efficient collaboration and communication, and time will be even more at a premium.

Training for reality is training for success

If at least 85% of the effectiveness of an employee comes down to their soft skills, why are soft skills massively underrepresented in many organisations’ training programmes? Logically, more than 85% of a business’ training offering should be focused on improving soft skills.

Now, the good news about the fact that not many businesses are offering that amount of soft skills training is that it leaves a great gap to benefit from. Those organisations that will put soft skills at the core of their business will gain a competitive advantage in terms of efficiency, customer service, sales, staff retention, and so on.

Where the assembly line might have been the driver of business growth and efficiency in the beginning of the 20th century, soft skills can play that role in the beginning of the 21st.