From ‘soft’ to ‘human’: what’s in a name?

As an English specialist, I am fascinated by etymology, so my starting point when thinking about general skills for work and life is to discover the origins of the word we use the most to describe them, which is: ‘soft’. My Ecosia search engine found me plenty of material to suggest that people started talking about a set of skills not covered by academic or vocational courses - skills applicable across the full range of occupations - as early as the 1970s. Apparently, the US army can claim credit for noticing that leadership played a significant part in the success experienced by some teams in training.

At the catchily titled US Continental Army Command Soft Skills Training Conference in 1972, a psychologist called Paul Whitmore and his team tried clarifying the distinction between this newly identified skill and others more familiar and decided that, because people are soft and machines are hard, dealing with people requires ‘soft skills’. (The idea that the self-styled hard men of the US Army in the early 1970s would onboard a ‘soft’ leadership strategy seems somehow incongruous, but I am happy to be called wrong.) Whitmore suggested at the time that job tasks ‘about which we know very little are soft skills’. That sounds like a recipe for confusion to me but the idea stuck.

As the 20th century progressed, so did our collective understanding. Society started to think of soft skills as personal qualities which could be leveraged to great effect in social settings. These personal qualities included communication, leadership and empathy, but also critical thinking and learning strategies. In fact, cognitive function and social ability have seemed to intertwine messily over the years in an ever changing list of ‘skills which might be useful when dealing with life’. 

And as time moved on, employers beyond the US Army began to see the value of soft skills in the workplace to the extent that investment in training programmes became a valuable use of the HR budget, and lists of personal qualities featured on job descriptions along with job-related skills, providing hiring managers with another set of criteria to apply during the selection process. Employers today have a shopping list of skills - both soft and hard - that they complain are out of stock on the job seeker shelves. Without vocational skills, expensive training programmes must be devised for new staff to get them up to speed. Without soft skills, new hires are likely not to cope or progress, resulting in churn and high recruitment costs.

So the demand for a blended ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ skills profile is tangible.

However, we have a skills supply issue. For the purposes of this blog, let’s focus only on issues relating to soft skills supply.

Firstly, the naming of these apparently ‘touchy-feely’ skills as ‘soft’ is problematic. Part of the problem stems from the proliferation of descriptors: these skills have variously been called ‘common’, ‘professional’ and ‘power’ skills. Just this week, the newly formed Skills England referred to them as 'Employability', 'transferable', 'cross-cutting' and 'essential' in just a few short paragraphs. If we still don’t know how to define this vital set of skills, how can we identify, develop or teach them?

The second, possibly more significant, issue is that the term ‘soft skills’ has become pejorative. Now, I am going to be overly simplistic because I need to emphasise my point, so please forgive my blunt generalisations: We have come to accept, however subconsciously, that scientists and engineers deal with hard things, like machines, test tubes and pipes. Solid manly things. Meanwhile, therapists, teachers and nurses deal with soft things, like people and feelings. Feminine, unquantifiable things. Over the decades, society has tended to place more value on professions involving hard skills - value that has seen high salaries and status for those who develop ‘hard’ skills. 

Unsurprisingly, as a result, we have seen low numbers of women entering professions that emphasise ‘hard’ skills and low numbers of men showing an interest in professions requiring a mastery of ‘soft’ skills. We have hardly any male primary school teachers and hardly any female data scientists. There is sometimes even an assumption that soft skills simply aren’t necessary unless one is planning a people-focused career. Whitmore might be tempted to offer a dejected ‘I told you so’ were he still with us, because he decided way back in the 1970s, almost as soon as he had shared his theory, that the soft and hard definitions were unhelpful and could cause confusion or be misconstrued.

The third issue with ‘soft skills’ is that, possibly due to their perceived unmanageable woolliness, our education system does not prescriptively teach them. My views on various international curricula must be reserved for another time, but generally speaking, teachers must follow knowledge-based syllabi, teaching formulas, methods, theories and models. There is little time allocated to the deliberate, conscious development of soft skills, and education and training institutions are not measured on the effectiveness of those skills.

As a result of our collective inability to clearly define, properly teach or sensibly respect soft skills, we are in a bit of a pickle. As an organisation dedicated to supporting career starters to effectively transition into the world of work, Vitruvia has decided to change the narrative. I should stress that we are not alone in moving away from the fuzziness of ‘soft’ and nor are we the first to use this new term.

What is our preferred terminology? We say these skills are Human. 

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Here we are in 2025, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, in the midst of the 4th industrial revolution, with the development of artificial intelligence turning into a frenzied technological arms race, with the associated fear that job opportunities will diminish and people will be sidelined whilst the robots masterfully take over, and faced with knotty existential problems that we will need all our collective genius to overcome. Surely it is more important than ever that we dedicate ourselves to developing our full HUMAN potential?

Respected international bodies like the ILO, WEF and UN are telling us that human skills are vital. Industry bodies everywhere are telling us that there is a damaging - and growing - skills gap. Governments are producing Papers of all colours which outline strategic approaches to skills acquisition that will ensure we can all enjoy an equitable, fulfilling future, where citizens and economies can thrive. And acquiring human skills unlocks that future.

If we can use ‘human’ as a frame of reference for skills that sit outside of academic and vocational syllabi but which we know are vital - not just for job acquisition, but for life-long personal and career fulfilment, we may be able to move away from pejorative associations and gain new clarity. We might even feel empowered by our human capacity to excel. I may be wrong, but I think there’s a US Army platoon leader somewhere giving me the thumbs up on that one.