Soft Skills

Soft skills: a definition

Soft skills (المهارات الناعمة) are the abilities connected with the way a person works with other people and with themselves, such as communication, problem solving and time management. They are set against technical skills, which are tied to a particular tool or to a particular specialisation.

Why the name soft skills is misleading

The word “soft” suggests two things about these skills: that they matter less than technical skills, and that they are easier to acquire. On both counts the reverse is true. Soft skills are slower to learn than a technical tool, and they are harder to measure.

The first of those two facts concerns learning. A technical tool is learnt more quickly than a soft skill, so the suggestion that soft skills are the easier kind to acquire runs against the comparison the name itself invites.

The second fact concerns measurement. Because a soft skill is harder to measure than a technical one, a general description of it does not count as an assessment, and the assessment of soft skills needs the approach set out further down.

For that reason some of the literature uses other names for soft skills, such as “behavioural skills” or “transferable skills”. The first name points to behaviour, and the second points to the fact that the skills can be carried from one role to another. Of the two, “transferable skills” is the more accurate, because it describes what actually distinguishes these skills, and that quality is the first of the practical features set out in the next section.

What distinguishes soft skills in practice

In practice, soft skills are distinguished by three features.

• Soft skills transfer between roles. A skill in negotiation moves with the person who has it from one role to another. Mastery of a particular system is different, because it is tied to that system rather than to the person’s way of working, and its value in a new role depends on whether that role uses the same system.
• Soft skills show in context, not in a test. They are not measured by an examination. They are measured by observing behaviour under real pressure, in the course of actual work.
• The weight of soft skills grows with responsibility. The wider the scope of a person’s supervision, the greater the weight of their ability to communicate and to make decisions, relative to the weight of their technical skill.

The second feature bears on the point about measurement raised by the name. The behaviour that shows a soft skill appears in context and under real pressure, and an examination provides neither of those conditions.

The third feature is stated in relative terms. It concerns the balance between the ability to communicate and decide on one side and technical skill on the other, within the same person’s role, and the weight of the first increases against the second as the scope of supervision widens.

How soft skills are assessed without guesswork

A general description such as “has excellent communication skills” does not work as an assessment, because it cannot be verified. It states no situation, no action and no outcome, so an assessor has nothing against which to check it, and a second assessor has nothing to confirm or to dispute.

The practical approach is to turn the skill into behaviour observed in a situation. The question then is no longer whether a person has the skill in general, but what they did in a specific situation: what they did when an objection from a client reached them, and how they rearranged their priorities when two deadlines clashed.

Each of those questions asks about something that happened, in a situation that can be named. The answer can then be examined: what the situation was, what the person did in it, and what followed.

This is the logic of behavioral interview questions, and it is also the logic of frameworks of competencies. The two share it: each replaces a general description of a quality with behaviour observed in a situation.

How soft skills are developed

A training course on its own introduces the concept of a soft skill, but it does not build the skill. The reason lies in where soft skills are built: their field is repeated practice with feedback. Knowing what the concept means is not the same as practising the behaviour on one occasion after another and being told how it went. The practice is repeated because the skill is built across repeated occasions of use, not in a single attempt.

The approaches closest to that field are the following.

• A real task with limited risk. The skill is practised on actual work rather than on an exercise, and the task is chosen so that the risk attached to it is limited.
• Observing a more experienced colleague. Through job shadowing, in which a person accompanies a colleague during their work, the person watches someone with more experience in the situations where the skill is used.
• Feedback close to the event. The feedback is given near the time of the behaviour it concerns, not held over to the appraisal at the end of the year, when the event lies some way in the past.

Soft skills and what a role actually requires

Soft skills are no substitute for technical skill in a role that requires technical skill, and the reverse is also true: technical skill is no substitute for soft skills in a role that requires them. Where a role requires both kinds of skill, the presence of one does not make up for the absence of the other.

The fault arises when the label “soft skills” is used in place of stating what the role actually needs. A list of general qualities in a job advertisement tells neither the candidate nor the assessor anything that can be checked. The candidate cannot tell from such a list what the role will ask of them, and the assessor cannot tell from it what to look for. In that use the label stands where a statement of the role’s actual needs should stand, and it carries none of the content such a statement would carry.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.