Demand and Supply for Soft Skills in current professional landscape.
Soft skills - one of the topics in professional development constantly considered by many employees irrelevant due to qualified as non-tangible. While having a strong foundation of hard skills acquired through multiple university qualifications can certainly be beneficial, it is no longer sufficient for success in today's professional landscape. Employers now value a broader range of skills and qualities in addition to technical expertise. Interestingly, the latest research shows that, although impressed by the vast technical knowledge of candidates, many employers struggle to find people with strong soft skills such as communication, organisation, teamwork, time management, critical thinking, creativity, interpersonal communication or adaptability.
2016 nationwide study from Wonderlic which surveyed 260 employers, found that 93% of these employers considered soft skills “very important” or even “essential”. A LinkedIn article found that 59% of hiring managers believe it’s difficult to find candidates with soft skills.
Soft skills are high on managers’ priority lists while making hiring decisions and consider them more significant than tech skills. They are not just useful to have on the job but the particular work descriptions make it clear that technical skills alone are not enough anymore. Employers ranked leadership skills and the ability to work in a team as the most desirable attributes of new university graduates, well ahead of analytical or quantitative skills.
The analytics firm Burning Glass analysed millions of job postings and found that one in three skills requested in job offers is also a soft skill. Harvard research confirms that finding, and a professor ,David Deming reported that jobs with high social-skill requirements are on the 10% increase when, during the same period, the proportion of jobs that were math-intensive but less social decreased by about 3%.
The conversation about soft skills is definitely not one-sided. Graduate students and working professionals at all stages in their careers express a vast interest in developing their soft skills. Since talented graduates with soft skills are scarce, employers recognised the necessity to have them nurtured and constantly improved in house. Development of soft skills training providers flourished in the recent years and range of services delivered has far exceeded employers expectations. Therefore, it is important to supply yourself in the bespoke trainings matching industrial requirements as having solely general knowledge seems to be too little in current fast pacing business environment.
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