Soft skills are highly valued across all industries, in diverse fields and for a variety of positions and titles. These skills deal with interpersonal and intrapersonal personality traits and characteristics. As a result, soft skills are more difficult to teach than technical hard skills and are often overlooked. That being said, soft skills like emotional intelligence, communication, and time management are crucial for individual professional growth, leadership success, and team collaboration.
The most in-demand job skills continuously shift as new trends emerge in this digital age. LinkedIn’s report of 2020’s top in-demand job skills lists the top five soft skills as: creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and emotional intelligence. These skills are ‘human’ skills, meaning they cannot be replaced by computers in the way technical, organizational, or analytical abilities can be.
Moreover, soft skills are just as essential as hard skills and should not be underestimated when building upskilling programs for youth and students. The Stanford Research Institute International and the Carnegie Melon Foundation found that 75% of long-term job success is attributed to soft skills while only 25% is attributed to hard skills.
Which soft skills are most valuable to have?
Creativity
Creativity is the top soft skill right now. While creative thinking can come naturally to many artistically inclined people, it can be a challenge for many others.
Is creativity teachable? Yes and no. Creativity can be difficult to teach with systematic rules, guidelines, and facts, but it can be nurtured through practice and experiential learning. Recent research suggests that creativity can be learned in work-integrated environments with creative problem-solving exercises. Youth who need to harness creativity as a top soft skill for employment should explore these types of practical opportunities.
Persuasion
Persuasion is currently the second most in-demand soft skill. Indeed suggests that the development of persuasion skills comes from cultivating relationships, building self-confidence, and practicing communication skills. All three of these practices are learning outcomes of work-integrated learning experiences.
A Malaysian study on undergraduate students in WIL programs found that students build meaningful work relationships, nurture self-confidence of their abilities, and practice workplace communication in an immersive environment as they interact with mentors and colleagues. The current research suggests that experiential learning is key to nurturing the foundational skills of larger skills like persuasion.
Collaboration
Collaboration is another valuable, in-demand soft skill. Interestingly, collaboration is a set of skills that is necessary for other soft and hard skills to be effective because peers need to exchange knowledge and teach one another in team settings. Successful workplace collaboration requires strong interpersonal skills and communication skills; team members work best when they can understand and work through one another’s feelings and ideas. Suffice to say that collaboration and the set of skills that emerge out of it are essential for almost any position.
Adaptability
Adaptability is also likely best nurtured in a practical and experiential environment. Adaptability is learned from and demonstrated by real-world experience, which is why job interviews often involve situational questions like: “have you ever had a project suddenly change after putting in a considerable amount of time? How did you handle this change?” Employers want the candidate to demonstrate how well they adapt to changes in their workplace. Indeed’s advice on how to improve adaptability as a job skill emphasizes experiential learning, recommending job seekers ask for feedback and try to be conscious of changes in the work environment.
Emotional Intelligence
Lastly, emotional intelligence is an essential soft skill. Harvard Business Review defines emotional intelligence by four domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Within these domains are sub-characteristics like empathy, teamwork, and conflict management. The development of emotional intelligence comes from real-world practice. Young skill-builders should work to become conscious of their’s and others’ emotions — how conflict is handled, how teams work harmoniously, how they communicate emotions with others, and so on.
The soft skills of today and tomorrow are important for youth and youth career professionals to keep in mind when considering an approach to skill development. Experiential learning is recommended by researchers who have found that soft skills like creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and emotional intelligence, can be nurtured effectively in work-integrated learning environments. As such, youth and students should pursue these essential skills alongside pursuing hard skills: with careful attention and real-world practice.
Read more about skills development in How to Build Soft Skills in a Remote Classroom.