Home>Why soft skills are essential
03.12.2024
Why soft skills are essential
Rapidly changing occupations, constantly updated required job skills, continually evolving work environments and methods: organisations today are changing at an exponential pace. More than ever soft skills make indispensable traits in adapting to this ever-shifting environment.
Soft skills are becoming increasingly closely scrutinised by companies and recruiters alike. From adaptability and stress management to teamwork and the ability to learn quickly – all vital complements to hard skills –, soft skills are now expected to feature on CVs and come up in job interviews, even for candidates applying for more technical roles, such as engineers.
In fact, social and emotional skills are now seen as crucial for employees to be able to adapt to a professional world in perpetual flux. Soft skills are vital in the first instance to keep afloat in our uncertain climate and adjust to national and international events – pandemics, social unrest, global conflict, waves of inflation – that can impact on a company, its markets or its organisation.
At the same time, executives are having to face the breakneck speed at which jobs, and with them skills, are mutating. The digital revolution is one of the major thrusts of this changing landscape, to say nothing of artificial intelligence, which is pushing a whole slew of sectors to the precipice of an unprecedented shift. “More and more routine tasks will be automated,” says Jérémy Lamri, affiliated professor at Sciences Po Executive Education and co-founder of Lab RH. “This means that employees will be asked to focus on more complex tasks that require finding solutions to problems.
To do so, technical skills won’t be sufficient: they will need to draw on soft skills like creativity or the ability to work in a group.” The ecological transition is set to be another driving force of change within companies. According to a study published by Apec in 2023*, 64% of executives feel that it will have significant future impact on their job. Here too soft skills will be precious commodities in navigating this changing landscape.
There’s been a seismic shift in working conditions, too. The surge in remote-working seen since the Covid-19 pandemic is one of the most noticeable signs of this. This has gone hand in hand with sweeping changes to working practices, encouraged, amongst others, by the aspirations of young graduates: the proliferation of feedback between employees and managers, increasing interaction and collaboration between departments and others. All these changes are driving adaptability, communication skills and team-playing to the top of the list of required skills employees must have to move up in their organisation.
5 ESSENTIAL SOFT SKILLS FOR THE FUTURE
This is the number one skill gaining traction in companies. By being agile, employees, and by extension a whole department or business unit, can keep pace with the profound, and often unforeseen, changes that are affecting organisations. This skill is inextricably linked to the capacity to learn that is so vital for navigating new environments. Sciences Po Executive Education has a number of leadership and soft skills programmes to help you develop this skill.
As organisations are faced with more and more challenges to resolve, employees are expected to be able to communicate clearly, both when delivering messages and taking them on board (active listening). In this area, Sciences Po Executive Education offers a wide range of communications programmes. Understanding communication practices is all the more important with the development of remote- working which requires expertise in the mechanics of virtual communications.
This is becoming a highly sought-after skill among today’s recruiters, which points to its growing importance. And it makes sense when you consider that no project is an island: whatever an employee or team is working on, it’s bound to require input from other departments or entities. Organisations need collective intelligence, which means they also need employees who have the ability to find their place in a group and cooperate well. Read about our human engineering and soft skills programmes.
With the rise of remote work, interest in this particular aptitude is rising among companies. Autonomy is the ability to take initiative but also to manage your own workload in view of achieving your goals (through skills such as time management and prioritising).
“This skill is critical to an organisation’s survival,” continues Jérémy Lamri. Curiosity is about having a thirst for knowledge, questioning different perspectives, approaching risks as opportunities, and preventing executives (not to mention the organisations they work for) from becoming set in their ways. Amphis 21, a series of eight conferences, will help feed your hunger to explore new ideas.
*Apec (Association for the Employment of Executives) study published in 2023
To Find Out More
