Soft Skills Research
Last Updated November 10th, 2023
The following soft skills research provides background and context for the SkillBars soft skills training programs. It contains links to PDF whitepapers and relevant excerpts from the most reputable and credible industry sources on topics related to labor markets, workplace culture, workforce development, employee engagement, and the future of work.
KPMG Global Tech Report 2023
KPMG•2023•32 pages
To help ensure that IT teams are collaborating effectively with the rest of the business, senior leaders in tech departments may need to bridge skill gaps. “Tech talent often excels with technical skills, but soft skills tend to be a hurdle, so the challenge for tech leaders is to bridge over the gap to create a healthy blend of both," says von Roeder. “Getting this balance right is something the tech industry has still to master."
Skills-First: Reimagining the Labor Market and Breaking Down Barriers
LinkedIn•2023•40 pages
LinkedIn has created a list of in-demand skills featured in 78% of global job postings since 2015. This includes soft skills like leadership, communication, and problem-solving and hard skills like digital marketing, financial analysis, and business development.
Building a Workforce Development Ecosystem That Works: Addressing the Skills Gap
Deloitte•2023•12 pages
Too often, however, many educational institutions have not been nimble in reimagining programs to prepare students with employable skills. In short, schools aren’t giving students the skills that employers need. As technology advances in the workplace, fewer workers are needed for basic, repetitive tasks, better suited to automation. While technical skills are in high demand, business requirements are also shifting toward uniquely human or soft skills, such as critical thinking, communication, and empathetic judgment.
The State of Organizations 2023
McKinsey•2023•92 pages
Purposeful communication is a skill and an art. To achieve it, leaders, managers, and influencers will need to be prepared to craft and deliver authentic messages that show vulnerability and empathy.
2023 Workplace Learning Report: Building the Agile Future
LinkedIn Learning•2023•52 pages
Human skills remain critically important, especially with the ongoing prevalence of hybrid work. 10 skills companies need most: Management, Communication, Customer Service, Leadership, Sales, Project Management, Research, Analytical Skills,Marketing, Teamwork
Future of Jobs Report 2023
World Economic Forum•2023•296 pages
Analytical thinking is considered a core skill by more companies than any other skill and constitutes, on average, 9% of the core skills reported by companies. Creative thinking, another cognitive skill, ranks second, ahead of three self-efficacy skills – resilience, flexibility and agility; motivation and self-awareness; and curiosity and lifelong learning – in recognition of the importance of workers ability to adapt to disrupted workplaces. Dependability and attention to detail, ranks sixth, behind technological literacy. The core skills top 10 is completed by two attitudes relating to working with others – empathy and active listening and leadership and social influence – as well as quality control.
Short on Skills? Rethink your Learning Approach
Deloitte•2023•28 pages
A lot has changed within the last years of exceptional circumstances, shaping how we live, work, lead, collaborate and also how we learn – and some of these changes are here to stay. We have learnt that skills based learning in the flow of work, new technologies and the use of data shape the future of learning. But are individuals, teams and organizations ready for it? Is the learning culture in organizations targeted on what the workforce actually needs, using the human power to adapt and acquire new skills? Do the keywords agile, continuous, life-long, social and collaborative accurately describe this culture?
Performance Through People: Transforming Human Capital into Competitive Advantage
McKinsey•2023•40 pages
From the worker’s perspective, organizational capital determines both the quality of their immediate day-to-day experience and their potential for longer-term development and earnings, among other things. Work is at the center of people’s lives and well-being. The pandemic highlighted the importance of “good work" — that is, the access to good-quality, safe, and secure work—and the value of human skills.
Sustainability through the Human Lens: Why Is It So Hard, Yet So Important?
Deloitte•2023•25 pages
Sustainability is a complex problem and needs to be addressed at all levels and in every department of an organization, using multidimensional and multi-disciplinary approaches to avoid silo-thinking. Thus, strategic and forward-thinking, multi-disciplinary teamwork, creative problem-solving, effective communication and story telling, advocacy and diplomacy, and driving change, are some examples of very relevant soft skills.
Defining Education 4.0: A Taxonomy for the Future of Learning
World Economic Forum•2023•28 pages
Abilities and skills are the set of process-oriented capabilities that enable an individual to achieve a specific goal. At the highest level of abstraction, abilities and skills fall into either: (1) cognitive and analytical aptitudes, including creativity, critical thinking and problem solving; or (2) interpersonal (non-cognitive) aptitudes, including communication, collaboration and the suite of socio-emotional skills. Skills falling into these two realms feature prominently among the skills sought after by employers. In one study of 2 million online job postings, the top five skills that employers requested were communication, creativity, collaboration, creative problem-solving and critical thinking.
2022 Workplace Learning & Development Trends
Society for Human Resource Management•2022•21 pages
Soft skills are those related to behavioral and interpersonal abilities, such as the ability to effectively communicate, problem-solve, lead, collaborate and organize. More than 8 in 10 employees (84%) say it is important to them to get training on soft skills, with leadership training the most desired (cited by 54% of respondents). Just 7% of employees say they don’t need training in soft skills. More than three-quarters of organizations (76%) say they are likely to focus on soft-skills training within the next 12 months.
Microsoft New Future of Work Report 2022
Microsoft•2022•111 pages
Organizations should explicitly assist creation of team common ground (shared vocabulary, mental models, practices, experiences etc.) and work standards, facilitate team communication, provide mechanisms for teamwork transparency. HR also has an important role to play in improving practices for workload sharing, group rewards, and team competency development, which are antecedent to building the interpersonal trust needed for team collaboration, and ultimately feed into team innovation.
Shifting Skills, Moving Targets, and Remaking the Workforce
Boston Consulting Group•2022•44 pages
Digital jobs don’t just demand programming skills. These technical jobs now demand a balance of soft skills as well. These include skills involving organization, time management, verbal communication, leadership, positive thinking, listening, critical thinking, and building effective relationships
Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent
Harvard Business School & Accenture•2022•74 pages
Making hidden workers integral to a company’s talent management strategy requires more than simply hiring them into entry-level positions. They should be afforded the same opportunity as well as necessary support for career progression. That will require investing in the professional development and corporate learning systems that reflect the skills profiles of formerly hidden workers as well as the company’s expectations of its future talent requirements.
Gen Z is not Millennial Plus
Deloitte•2022•21 pages
Growing up in a technology-based world and experiencing life during a pandemic can make someone feel isolated. On the flip side, it can make them more independent and equipped with greater autonomy. Gen Zs deprioritised teamwork and social skills as areas of development, while instead, they prioritise critical thinking and problem-solving skills. In contrast, Millennials place teamwork and social skills at the top of their list.
Nurturing the Future of Work: How Organizations Empower Talent
Capgemini•2022•224 pages
The digital economy is evolving so fast that it is estimated that 85% of jobs that will exist in 2030 have yet to be invented. AI and robotics will transform existing jobs and required skillsets; employees will need to be agile, flexible, and equipped with a strong set of soft skills, on top of a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) background.
The Business Return on Learning and Development
Deloitte Access Economics•2022•55 pages
Even before the onset of COVID-19, businesses were grappling with rapidly changing skills needs. Advances in technology (alongside increasingly service focused industries) were driving a spike in demand for soft skills and other skills that are difficult to automate, such as communication and leadership, while repetitive, manual tasks were increasingly being automated. In fact, in previous research commissioned by DeakinCo., Deloitte Access Economics estimated that two-thirds of all jobs would be soft-skill intensive by 2030.
What Matters Most? Five Priorities for CEOs in the Next Normal.
McKinsey•2021•116 pages
I think we’ve spent the past 150 years making people more like machines. Think about Office Space and TPS reports coming back. That was funny because that’s how offices worked back then, much like manufacturing. Now those TPS reports are automated. What’s important now is a different set of skills: interpersonal skills, creativity, qualities that are more innately human. How a company invests in individuals—it’s no longer, “Hey, can I teach you exactly how to fill out the TPS report?" Instead, it’s, “How can I teach you social-interaction skills? How can I help you progress as a human being?"
Student Experience in the Age of the Customer
KPMG•2021•72 pages
The gloss has come off with employers. As economic change has sped up, industry has increasingly called for job-ready graduates rather than have to train them in-house; and the expectations of graduates by employers are being disappointed. Many employers say they are looking primarily for things that universities do not directly teach, such as social skills, emotional intelligence, teamwork, communication and time management.
Empowering the workforce of tomorrow
UNICEF & World Business Council for Sustainable Development•2021•27 pages
Transferable skills: Also called “life skills", “soft skills" or “socio-emotional skills", these skills empower children and young people to: navigate and meet the evolving demands of the labor market; be independent, creative and critical thinkers; remain agile, flexible and adaptive; master complex problems; and connect with others in highly collaborative settings. Transferable skills include problem solving, negotiation, managing emotions, empathy and communication, among others. Placed in the center of Figure 3, they can be seen as ‘magic glue’, connecting, reinforcing, and helping develop other skills types.
Workplace Learning Report: Skill Building in the New World of Work
LinkedIn Learning•2021•65 pages
Older generations of learners are focused more on developing their soft skills, like communication and leadership. But Gen Z employees are spending their time learning how to be more productive, and on business and technology basics — from learning how to code Python to understanding online marketing foundations. In the list of top courses that Gen Z took last year, you’ll notice that a majority of them are hard skills.
The Currency of Learning: 2021 Employer Research Report
Pearson•2021•35 pages
Soft skills represent the biggest gaps in today’s L&D programs. Employers indicate that there are plenty of L&D options available when it comes to technical skills, but soft skills are not being offered as widely.
Learning and Skills at Work Survey 2021
CIPD & Accenture•2021•52 pages
The need for learning is greater than ever. Business priorities have shifted rapidly, creating needs to flex the workforce and their skills around new work. Digital workplaces and the acceleration of cloud computing have demanded more specialist data, security and technology skills. A desire for more inclusive and meaningful experiences continues to drive needs for empathy, leadership, communication and other human skills. And probably the greatest need has been from individuals, who see personal growth as an essential part of meaningful work and careers.
The New Landscape for Workplace Learning: Employers and Workers Managing the Digital Transition
Northeastern University Center for the Future of Higher Education & Talent Strategy•2021•33 pages
Leadership and “people skills" - particularly those that would drive an organization’s culture, were mentioned by virtually all participants as their top priority. Many indicated that this represented a recent shift, primarily due to the pandemic and needing to support employees working in the remote environment and up-skilling leaders to for example identify and support wellbeing and mental health. One health professional emphasized that when organizations are not prioritizing soft skills, they are putting their organizations at risk. Many underscored that, particularly among managers, having the soft skills necessary to drive the organizational culture was critical, particularly in times of disruption and change. Across all levels of the workforce, “human" skills are being given priority given the growing pace of technology adoption and automation
The Essence of Resilient Leadership
Deloitte•2020•212 pages
When developing, hiring, and retraining IT talent, consider the individual’s learning agility and other soft skills, which may matter more than educational background or formal work experience.
L&D in a New Decade: Taking the Strategic Long View
LinkedIn Learning•2020•45 pages
This year, talent developers are laser focused on building soft skills— interpersonal skills that are foundational to every employee’s success, regardless of their functional role or how the technology landscape evolves. This is a smart investment, given that the shelf life of technical skills is relatively short—less than 5 years—while strong leadership, creative, and communication skills are always in demand.
Workplace Basics: The Competencies Employers Want
Georgetown University•2020•72 pages
In the modern labor market, five cognitive competencies are in high demand across all occupational groups: (1) communication, (2) teamwork, (3) sales and customer service, (4) leadership, and (5) problem solving and complex thinking. • Among the five competencies with generally high demand, communication is dominant: it has the highest demand across occupations, is in the top three most-demanded competencies within every occupational group, and is associated with the highest earnings boosts across the labor market.
Meeting the Challenges of Developing Collaborative Teams for Future Success
Harvard Business Review & SHRM•2019•12 pages
More companies may be organizing teams and working collaboratively, but it doesn’t mean they’re doing it particularly well, or that employees are more efficient or effective. “Doing teams well all goes back to companies being willing to invest in employee development and training in how to work on teams.
The Enterprise Guide to Closing the Skills Gap
IBM•2019•20 pages
Executives’ responses indicate workers require a blend of both digital skills and soft skills – also called behavioral skills – to be successful in the workforce. As we revealed in our 2016 report on global skills, “Facing the storm," executives have placed a high value on digital skills. In fact, the report indicates that six in ten cited fundamental and advanced technical capabilities in math, science, and computing as their most sought-after workforce capabilities.
The Future of Work in Technology: How Technology Leaders Can Reimagine Technology Work, the Workforce, and the Workplace
Deloitte•2019•32 pages
In the past, soft skills that support collaboration and communication typically took a back seat to specialized technical skills. Today, soft skills are having a breakout moment. These enduring, essentially human skills are increasing in value in part because they cannot be replicated by machines.
Towards a Reskilling Revolution: Industry-Led Action for the Future of Work
World Economic Forum•2019•93 pages
Human capital is a crucial asset of any business—in fact, in an age of ubiquitous technology, it is human skills, creativity and capability that will form the competitive edge for any organization. Financing and implementing a reskilling revolution must thus be viewed as a critical investment for business, workers and economies alike.
Talent-Driven Economic Development: A New Vision and Agenda for Regional and State Economies
Brookings•2019•54 pages
A young person’s “employability" is subjective, but generally it derives from the acquisition of both technical skills and foundational skills (i.e. communication, teamwork, etc.). Compared to children growing up in low-income and less-educated families, children raised in prosperous families and communities are not only likelier to receive a more rigorous technical education, but they also learn “soft skills" and are exposed to the social networks that allow them to succeed in a white-collar world.
Leading the Social Enterprise: Reinvent with a Human Focus
Deloitte•2019•112 pages
New research shows that the jobs in highest demand today, and those with the fastest accelera- tion in wages, are so-called “hybrid jobs" that bring together technical skills, including technology op- erations and data analysis and interpretation, with “soft" skills in areas such as communication,service, and collaboration. The concept of superjobs takes this shift one step further. In a superjob, technology has not only changed the nature of the skills the job requires but has changed the nature of the work and the job itself. Superjobs require the breadth of tech- nical and soft skills that hybrid jobs do—but also combine parts of different traditional jobs into integrated roles that leverage the significant productivity and efficiency gains that can arise when people work with smart machines, data, and algorithms.
The Wage Premium Associated with Human Skills
Deloitte•2019•40 pages
However, research is beginning to quantify the financial value of human skills training for business. For example, in one study, workers were given 80 hours of training to improve skills such as time management, effective communication, problem-solving, and financial literacy. The study found that this human skills training increased the productivity of workers by 20%, and provided a net return to businesses from training of 258%, eight months after program completion.4
Skill Shift: Automation and the Future of the Workforce
McKinsey•2018•84 pages
Our research finds that workers of the future will spend considerably more time deploying these skills than they do today. In aggregate, between 2016 and 2030, demand for these social and emotional skills will grow across all industries by 26 percent in the United States and by 22 percent in Europe. While some of these social and emotional skills are innate, such as empathy, they can also be honed and, to some extent, taught more easily than technological skills—for example, advanced communication.
Learning to Learn: The Future-Proof Skill
KPMG•2018•28 pages
According to a LinkedIn survey of 2,000 business leaders, soft skills in future candidates are actually found much more important than hard skills. The survey shows that employers looked for individuals who demonstrated the following specific soft skills: leadership, communication, collaboration, time management.
Preparing Tomorrow’s Workforce for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Deloitte•2018•58 pages
Recognizing our growing technological interconnectedness, the expansion of global markets, youths’ mobility and migration, and the diversity of workplaces, there is a growing emphasis on “global competence": The ability to apply acquired soft skills in cross-cultural, multicultural, and global contexts.56 A common thread across these soft skills, SEL competencies, and global competencies is that they are decidedly “human" traits that, for now, are irreplaceable by machines.
Use of Data from 21st Century Skills Assessments: Issues and Key Principles
Brookings•2018•46 pages
The changes in our economy and society in this century have placed a greater emphasis on the skills that citizens need to be successful. This diverse set of skills, often referred to as 21st century skills, and including critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, communication, and socio-emotional skills, among others, are in high demand as the need for rote or routine-based knowledge decreases due to automation in the workplace (Rotherham & Willingham, 2010). In education specifically, there is the concern of a global learning crisis—that students are not fully prepared with the skills they need to thrive in today’s rapidly changing world (The Education Commission, 2017)
The Rise of the Social Enterprise: 2018 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends
Deloitte•2018•104 pages
Research suggests that while automation can improve scale, speed, and quality, it does not do away with jobs. In fact, it might do just the opposite. As Boston University professor James Bessen has reported in his research, occupations with greater levels of computerization and technology experience higher, not lower, employment growth rates.19 What’s more, in many cases, the newly created jobs are more service-oriented, interpretive, and social, playing to the essential human skills of creativity, empathy, communication, and complex problem solving.