Soft Skills Are Increasingly Crucial To Getting Your Dream Job
In January, we published a list of the 25 most in-demand skills. As you may have noticed, all of the skills on the list are hard skills — specific skills that are required to do a job that are learned, like mobile development, channel marketing, and economics. But numerous employers have told us they’re struggling to find candidates with soft skills — personal attributes that help people interact effectively with others, like communication, teamwork, and critical thinking.
As an economist, I wanted to see if there was any evidence of the growing demand for soft skills. So we asked 291 U.S. hiring managers in May how hard it was to find candidates with soft skills for each of the jobs they were hiring for. Fifty-nine percent of hiring managers’ responses were that soft skills are “difficult” to find, whereas 53 percent of responses were that hard skills are “difficult” to find. And 58 percent said the lack of soft skills among candidates is “limiting their company’s productivity.”