06-05-2025
Let's stop calling them ‘soft skills.' They're the hardest ones to master
At a recent academic conference, I noticed a familiar unease ripple through conversations about 'soft skills.' Many participants winced at the term. They recognized the inadequacy of the term , yet struggled to agree on a better alternative. People floated around suggestions like 'human skills,' 'essential skills,' or 'power skills,' but none seemed to stick.
This persistent terminology problem reflects a deeper tension in our educational system. There's a long-standing bias that elevates 'hard' technical competencies over the nuanced, deeply human capabilities that actually define long-term professional success.
Historically, hard skills emerged from the natural sciences—quantitative, measurable, and increasingly automatable. Soft skills, on the other hand, draw from the liberal arts, humanities, and social sciences. These disciplines help us understand human behavior, expression, and interaction. These qualities are notoriously difficult to quantify and even harder to teach.
In business analytics, the field I teach, technical fluency is the price of entry. But what propels careers isn't just knowing which model to run. It's being able to explain it to a client, manage a team under pressure, adapt when the data shifts, and negotiate conflicting priorities. The multiplier is the human element.
