Expert shares importance of soft skills, best practices for offering training on this for workers
Nearly three-fourths (74%) of individuals say their employer offers professional development, while 49% say their employer offers opportunities for learning and development outside of mandatory training, according to a recent report.
However, just 35% say their employer offers soft skills training, finds a survey from Wiley Workplace Intelligence.
“There's probably more opportunities available to people than they realize,” says Mark Scullard, senior director of product innovation at Wiley, in talking with HRD Canada.
“If you've ever been part of a large organization, you realize the number of different departments that are trying to get your attention and trying to tell you about opportunities or things that you must do to either stay in compliance or to be aware of this new policy or procedure. And there's so much vying for your attention. And so this isn't a knock on HR or L&D. It's just incredibly difficult to communicate the opportunities that are out there.”
Still, there are “probably fewer opportunities available than is optimal for an organization,” he says.
ManpowerGroup previously noted that the growing technical and soft skills gap is a "critical hurdle" that businesses need to overcome.
Why are soft skills important?
When people talk about soft skills, things like human skills and powers skills are often thrown around, says Scullard.
However, there are issues that are more related to performance – like problem solving and time management – that could also fall into that category, he says, along with interpersonal skills and intelligence-type skills.
These are important for the following reasons, he says:
“One is that we are incredibly intra-dependent. In pretty much any organization that you're in… we have to depend on each other, we have to communicate effectively.
“The second point is that there's a tremendous amount of differences between people that are just messy. We are wildly diverse, interpersonally speaking. We have these vastly different preferences and expectations and assumptions and patterns and habits that we bring into the workplace.
“And then interpersonally, we have certain expectations, and assumptions and patterns and habits that can all be counterproductive in the workplace. We've all got our own thing, our own way of being counter-productive.”
Soft skills help workers succeed
Depending on individual circumstances, high levels of soft skills can help workers succeed, he says.
In fact, 63% of those who received soft skills training say it positively impacted their performance, according to Wiley’s survey of over 2,000 workers in North America.
“If you could put together a broad measure of emotional intelligence, which many people have done, that's going to be correlated to some degree with productivity. But depending on your particular area of lacking emotional intelligence, that's going to interact with the culture that you're in or in the situation that you're in.”
And that makes it challenging for HR professionals and employers to ensure that workers have high levels of soft skills, says Scullard.
“If you're lacking in assertiveness, that might be no problem… if you find yourself… within an organization… that you need to be pushing and pushing and pushing and people aren't listening. The culture is such that you'd need to be really assertive,” he says.
“So the complexity is so high, which makes it so difficult for us to get our heads around how to help people become more emotionally intelligent and to develop the soft skills, because it depends not only on the person, but also the context.”
A workplace that prioritizes soft skills sees constant employee career progression, higher retention rates and higher levels of employee satisfaction, according to a previous HRD report.
How do you conduct soft skills training?
Still, Scullard shares two best practices that employers and HR leaders can try to help workers develop soft skills:
Personalize the soft skills training: “The things that we struggle with are very different… And we struggle with it in different ways,” he says. In this regard, artificial intelligence can be helpful, says Scullard. “AI can be extremely useful in connecting us to the resources that are already out there, understanding what does [one] need as an individual idiosyncrasy, what information is out there. Because chances are, without that, I'm never going to encounter that information. That information is never going to reach my ears”.
Put the training in a social context: “Soft skills training and development is most effective when it takes place in a social context,” he says. “These things aren't just intellectualization. They come from an emotional, deeper place… When I can talk to a group of people, and process that out loud, and hear from other people why it's so important to them… that's going to stick with me on that emotional level and, and make an imprint that you don't get otherwise.”
Employers need to prioritize soft skills training to help socially anxious Gen Z employees thrive in the workplace, according to a previous report.
