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Over the past ten years, the phrase “soft skills” has increasingly entered public

discussions in various forums including the media, business (often in human

resources and skills training), elementary, secondary, and post-secondary

education, as well as in peer-reviewed research journals.1 As often happens

when a phrase begins to appear so frequently, its use is often a direct reflection

of some form of crisis, debate, or change in the wider society.

In the case of soft skills, speaking anecdotally, I began to notice around

2010 that the phrase was cropping up in discussions with my colleagues at a

WHAT’S COVERED IN THIS CHAPTER?

In this chapter you’ll learn:

• A multifaceted definition of soft skills

• What employers and researchers have said about soft skills

• Whether or not soft skills should be considered a “moral reform”

movement

1. Examples of recent soft skills coverage includes Lister (2019 ) “Corporate Canada Is Facing a Soft-

Skills Deficit” www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/leadership/article-corporate-canada-

is-facing-a-soft-skills-deficit-what-can-we-do/; King (2019 ) “Wanted: Employees Who Can Shake

Hands, Make Small Talk” www.wsj.com/articles/wanted-experts-at-soft-skills-1544360400; Brett

(2018 ) “Future Graduates Will Need Creativity and Empathy: Not Just Technical Skills” www.

theguardian.com/education/2018/dec/20/future-graduates-will-need-creativity-and-empathy-

not-just-technical-skills . Similar examples abound in the business press, and in peer-reviewed edu-

cation, psychology, and organizational behavior journals. Some of these peer-reviewed sources are

discussed later.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003212942-12 Soft Skills in a Digital Age

large urban community college. At the same time, the phrase began to appear

in various think-tank reports as well as in newspaper business sections. Upon

first glance, I could see that the phrase was being used in one of two ways.

First, it was being used by employers to name a group of sought-after skills

they thought weren’t being displayed effectively enough by employees (the

“complaint” or “gap/deficit” view of soft skills). Second, it was being used by

journalists, educators, and skills trainers to name a group of sought-after skills

that employees and potential employees could and should master, in order to be

successful (the “self-help” or “competency” view of soft skills).

As you begin your exploration of soft skills, let’s agree to resist easy defini-

tions of the term. You’ll find it more productive to start thinking of soft skills

as an elastic and relational term. By this I mean when it comes to defining soft

skills, besides saying that it’s “a noun that refers to a group of skills that are

sought-after in today’s world”, the phrase also has several other meanings. For

one, as we saw earlier, it can refer to a complaint that exists in the world about

the way people behave. For another, it can refer to techniques you can use to

improve these poor behaviors. In other words, a key aspect of the phrase soft

skills is that it’s always both referring to the problem that it solves and at the

same time embodying the solution. “Soft skills” is one of those terms like “val-

ues” that signifies both a problem and a solution.

Going a bit further down this path, when I say that soft skills both refer to a

problem and embody the solution to that problem, I’m getting close to answer-

ing the question that’s implied whenever the term “soft skills” is mentioned:

why do we need soft skills? We need them, I’d argue, because they offer one

useful solution to a current challenge facing many parts of the Western world.

The challenge, simply put, is how to manage vast amounts of change in the

make-up of society and in how society functions, knowing that many people’s

natural tendency is to be conservative (not necessarily in the political sense),

that is, to like things the way they are.

The changes I’m speaking about are, on the one hand, rapidly increasing

amounts of diversity in our societies, both racial and ethnic and gender-

based, as immigration increases to fill the demographic decline in places like

Canada, the United States, and Western Europe, and as new definitions of

gender become normalized.2 At the same time, rapidly increasing amounts

2. Examples of rapid demographic change include Ballingall (2017) “A Majority of Torontonians Now

Identify Themselves as Visible Minorities” www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/10/25/a-majority-

of-torontonians-now-identify-themselves-as-visible-minorities-census-shows.html; Poston, Jr. and

Saenz (2017) “U.S. Whites Will Soon Be the Minority in Number, But Not Power”www.baltimoresun.

com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-op-0809-minority-majority-20170808-story.html; Dawar (2013) “White

Britons Are Now a Minority in 4 Towns and Cities” www.express.co.uk/news/uk/370013/White-

Britons-are-now-a-minority-in-4-towns-and-cities . Discussions of acute generational conflict include

“The Clash of the Baby Boomers and Millenials” www.forbes.com/sites/nazbeheshti/2018/11/29/

the-clash-of-the-baby-boomers-and-millennials-how-can-we-all-get-along/#64a24f81f9e2;

“Generational Differences at Work Are Small: Thinking They’re Big Affects Our Behavior” https://Soft Skills in a Digital Age 3

of technological disruption exist in our lives, by which I mean all the new and

changing tools, gadgets, apps, and digital modalities we encounter in our home

and work lives such as Zoom, texting, Slack, office-hoteling and many oth-

ers.3 It’s these twin disruptors – diversity and digital technology – plus a third

disruptor I haven’t yet mentioned: sharp generational differences in society –

that seem to be causing the world we live in to be, to some degree, destabilized.

Here we can pause to add another provisional way to approach thinking

about soft skills. Soft skills invoke a small-c conservative movement for manag-

ing rapid change by creating and upholding agreed-upon standards for behav-

ior. In a world of disruption and change, it makes sense that a somewhat fuzzy

concept – soft skills – should emerge as one potential method of restoring things

to “normal”. An example will illustrate what I mean. Let’s say a large orga-

nization in the financial services sector was challenged recently with how to

reconcile its need for employees who can communicate effectively and its com-

mitment to diversity. A young employee complained to her manager that she felt

“exposed” and “threatened” when giving presentations. She further stated that

in her culture, speaking openly in front of other people was something women

were discouraged from doing and that she would therefore prefer not to have to

do this at work. Her manager’s private feelings were understandably conflicted.

The employee in question was a member of a visible minority, and his depart-

ment had for many years been working to increase its number of visible minority

employees.

At the same time, the manager was surprised by his employee’s complaint,

because speaking to co-workers, clients, and other parties (whether in a

conversation, a meeting, a presentation, or a seminar) was a bread-and-butter

aspect of the job, for people of all genders and backgrounds. In fact, the

employee had talked up her own strong communication skills when she was

interviewed for the job! And on top of that, “effective spoken and written

communication” is the first requirement listed in all of the department’s job

descriptions – considered so important that it appears before the more technical,

hard skills tasks like spreadsheet use, risk management assessment, or financial

planning capabilities. What was he supposed to do? How to reconcile the

diversity-based request (i.e., I’m uncomfortable speaking in front of people for

3. hbr.org/2019/08/generational-differences-at-work-are-small-thinking-theyre-big-affects-our-

behavior; Cotton (2019) “Millenials Cause Generational Conflict in the Workplace” www.business

leader.co.uk/millennials-cause-generational-conflict-in-the-workplace/60389/ .

Representative coverage of rapid technological change includes Jackson (2018 ) “Reports of Rapid

Tech Change Causing the Demise of Traditional Employment Are Greatly Exaggerated” www.

theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-reports-of-rapid-tech-change-causing-the-

demise-of-traditional/; Porter (2019 ) “Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two” www.nytimes.

com/2019/02/04/business/economy/productivity-inequality-wages.html; and Partington (2019 )

“Things Are Changing So Fast” www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/30/changing-fast-

benefits-dangers-robots-uk-workplace.4 Soft Skills in a Digital Age

cultural reasons) with necessary workplace norms (i.e., speaking in front of

people is a foundational part of the job)?

Clearly this example is stark, and not likely to occur frequently. That said,

less stark and dramatic versions of the clash between established norms and

new points of view are happening every day; otherwise we wouldn’t be hear-

ing all the noise we have been for ten years about the “lack of” or “gap in”

soft skills. Perhaps one way out of this dilemma is to examine briefly another

way in which soft skills can be approached, and that is, by reference to its

binary opposite of “hard skills”. In the same way that “soft skills” is elastic

and relational because it refers both to a problem and to the solution to that

problem, so too is it elastic and relational because it is always referring, if only

obliquely and subtly, to its opposite, which is “hard skills”. Like all binary

opposites (good/bad; beautiful/ugly; rich/poor; gay/straight; etc.) liberal-

minded academic commentators have long argued that seemingly neutral

binary oppositions like hard skills/soft skills are not neutral (or natural) but

rather culturally produced. And what’s more, they’re produced in a dishon-

estly “equal-looking” form (i.e., the binary) that serves to mask the reality,

which is that one term in the binary is always valorized, or held in higher

esteem, compared with the other term.4

In such a cultural analysis, it’s customary to destabilize or deconstruct the

binary to show, for example, how the less equal term within it is as valuable or

even more valuable than its opposite. In another form of this type of analysis,

you can demonstrate that there are categories that stand apart from, between,

or outside the binary that are just as valid (e.g., today the gay/straight binary is

rarely invoked without recognizing the validity of bisexuality or trans identi-

ties and the oversimplification, in terms of sexual orientation, of the original

binary). If you were to perform such a destabilizing analysis of the hard skills/

soft skills binary, you might begin by agreeing that “hard skills” has tradition-

ally been the valorized term. It points to the specific, technical, skills-based

abilities – often stemming from years of education and training or else natural

talent – that employees demonstrate as part of their job, and which set them

apart from others who don’t have these abilities.

Historically, soft skills were thus the less valorized part of the binary. These

skills, variously known as “professionalism”, “people skills”, “ability to get

along”, “confidence”, “communication” among many other synonyms, were

4. Helpful discussions of binaries and their deconstruction in various forms of analysis include Wilcox

(2015 ) “Deconstructive Literary Criticism” https://medium.com/@brettwilcox/deconstructive-

literary-criticism-e2fcf9b2e848; Thomassen (2010 ) “Deconstruction as Method in Political Theory”

https://webapp.uibk.ac.at/ojs/index.php/OEZP/article/viewFile/1369/1063; Kau (2001 ) “Decon-

struction and Science” http://sites.science.oregonstate.edu/~stetza/ph407H/Deconstruction.pdf;

Balkin (1987 ) “Deconstructive Practice and Legal Theory” https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/

cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7061&context=ylj . Similar sources can be found for numerous other

aspects of human culture or endeavour including religion, society, culture, education, etc.Soft Skills in a Digital Age 5

assumed to come with you into your job. In other words, the assumption was

that soft skills were part of our upbringing, our culture, our way of doing things.

No extra education or study was required, and any professional employee or

person aiming to be a professional could tap into these already-existing parts

of themselves, or know when and how to deploy and perform these skills.

Some people today, when speaking candidly – educators and employers among

them – still believe this. As a result, when soft skills behaviors are not obviously

deployed and performed, a crisis is invoked.

Funnily enough, it hasn’t required a cultural analysis to destabilize the hard

skills/soft skills binary. Two very real-world phenomena of the late 20th and

early 21st centuries, globalization and automation, have done the job for us.

Broadly speaking, for many years between the Industrial Revolution and the

immediate post–World War II decades, the Western world was the heart of

manufacturing, as well as of the various forms of innovation and ancillary func-

tions that go together with making things, such as research, design, market-

ing, finance, etc. The past 30 years have altered this picture. Manufacturing is

becoming skewed toward Asian and in some cases Latin American countries,

and even the ancillary industries supporting manufacturing are beginning to

shift their geographical locus.5 The impact this has had on the Western world

has been profound. We’ve experienced on the one hand an economic shift to

“knowledge economies” in which labor is more about creative, problem-solving

skills than about mass producing things (this is the positive end of the spectrum)

to, on the other hand, a political shift toward nationalist, populist governments

whose base of support comes from populations who feel “left behind” by the

knowledge economy shift (this is the negative end of the spectrum).

What you’ll want to be able to trace is the effect of this shift on the skills

required for success in the world. Clearly, the move toward people-centered,

knowledge-related work in much of the Western world has meant that soft skills,

which were previously nice-to-have’s (with the exception of certain areas such as

nursing or counseling in which they’ve been consciously needed for a long time),

have now become must-have’s across a much wider section of the economy. The

binary has been upset, or righted, and we now find ourselves in a place where

soft skills get much more notice than hard skills. It’s not uncommon to hear

employers and human resources consultants saying things like: “We can train

new employees to use the software/sell the product/code the software, etc. but

they need to be team players and problem solvers!” It’s now soft skills that are in

demand, and hard skills are taking a back seat, at least for the moment.

5. The somewhat contradictory evidence about the global manufacturing shift from West to East

is discussed in Ferdows (2020) “Five Myths about Manufacturing” www.washingtonpost.com/

outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-manufacturing/2020/08/28/ba8199a8-e7da-11ea-970a-

64c73a1c2392_story.html . Changes in research and development spending are highlighted in Con-

gressional Research Service (2020) “Global Research and Development Expenditures” https://fas.

org/sgp/crs/misc/R44283.pdf.6 Soft Skills in a Digital Age

As you move through this book therefore, remember that “soft skills” is a

term that’s in flux, and that’s ok. It defines a problem that exists in society, it

encompasses the solution to that problem, it invokes a conservative impulse to

uphold standards in human behavior, and it exists in a fluid binary opposition

with another set of skills – hard skills – that, while still very important, is cur-

rently in the shadow of the more necessary soft skills.