84% of the workforce insists job candidates must demonstrate soft skills, new study finds
The following contribution corresponds to Bryan Robinson, Ph.D. who defines himself: I am the author of 40 nonfiction books, including Chained to the Desk in a Hybrid World (New York University Press, 2023) and #Chill: Turn Off Your Job And Turn On Your Life (William Morrow, 2019). My books have been translated into 15 languages, and I co-host the podcast, How’s That Working for Ya? The Shrink and Ms. Smarty Pants on YouTube, ITunes and Spotify. I am Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where I conducted the first studies on children of workaholics and the effects of work addiction on marriage. I built my career on the themes of resilience and work-life balance and have lectured throughout the world on work addiction and workplace issues. My research was featured on 20/20, Good Morning America, ABC’s World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, NBC Universal, The CBS Early Show, CNBC’s The Big Idea and NPR’s Marketplace. I hosted the PBS documentary, Overdoing It: How to Slow Down and Take Care of Yourself. I maintain a private psychotherapy practice in Asheville, NC and reside in the Blue Ridge Mountains with my spouse, three dogs and occasional bears at night. Check out my website: bryanrobinsonphd.com
Recent research says managers and employees agree that new recruits must possess and demonstrate…sadfsadff
As technology rapidly changes, so does the shift in a variety of skill sets in the workplace. Social, emotional, and communication skills, in particular, have risen in demand.
Hiring managers have come to appreciate these soft skills as essential tools for success in today’s job market because they support remote work and offset the omnipresence of artificial intelligence in the workplace.
A previous study by Deloitte Insights reported that 92% of companies report
that human capabilities or soft skills matter as much or more than hard skills in today’s business world.
As the crucial need for skills like empathy, collaboration, and adaptability continues to grow, experts are starting to refer to them as «hard» skills that can be developed in the same way that playing a musical instrument or mastering a sport.
This skill set is shown rather than told through body language, facial expressions, and demeanor, and recruiters are looking for this foundational skill set in job interviews.
Now, a recent study by BusinessNameGenerator (BNG)
sought to uncover the American workforce’s views on soft skills in the workplace and the training provided to them.
After surveying 1,015 US employees across 12 industries, the study found that the introduction of new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) has catalyzed the shift in demand for specific skills, requiring employees to deepen their existing skill sets or integrate new ones such as personal attributes and non-technical skills that describe how people work and interact with others.
Overall, the data shows that the workforce believes it is important for employees to have a diverse skill set and not just focus on digital skills.
More specifically, 84% of employees and managers believe that new employees should possess soft skills and demonstrate them in the hiring process.
This figure was the highest in companies with more than 500 employees, as 90% stated that soft skills were the most important. You can check out the five soft skills during an interview that can enable job seekers to land a high-paying job here.
The study also found that 80% of women agreed that soft skills are valuable
While 90% of men considered them valuable in the workplace. The most common reasons for perceiving soft skills as important are that they can determine the success or failure of a hiring decision (22%). They are essential for career development (18%) and can help differentiate similar candidates (17%).
The top five companies that highlighted the importance of soft skills were (1) IT/Telecom (99%), (2) Finance (89%), (3) Education (89%) (4) HR (88%) and (5) Healthcare (85%).
The top five cities that emphasized the importance of soft skills were (1) Los Angeles (89%), (2) New York (89%), (3) San Francisco (88%), (4) Denver (85%) and (5) Phoenix (85%).
A Skills-Based Approach to Building the Workforce of the Future
The following contribution is from a McKinsey report and is authored by Bryan Hancock and Nikhil Patel, partners in McKinsey’s Washington, DC office; Chris Higgins, a consultant in the San Francisco office; Jonathan Law, a senior partner in the Southern California office; Sarah Olson, a consultant in the Denver office; and Katie Van Dusen, a consultant in the Ohio office.
This article benefits from the collective efforts of a wide range of colleagues and partners. The authors would like to thank the following people:
For their support on the article: Beth Cobert, Carrie Gonzalez, Matthew McKeever, Jacob Vigil, and Debbie Wasden (from the Markle Foundation); Sergio Galeano, Sarah Miller, and Katherine Townsend (from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta); and Osato Dixon, Bonnie Dowling, Roberta Fusaro, Jacquie Hudson, Najah Mushatt, Carolyn Pierce, Ben Saft, and Petra Vincent (from McKinsey).
For their contributions to McKinsey’s Rework America Alliance team over the past two years: Carla Arellano, Steve Armbruster, E.B. Armstrong, Tim Bacon, Kristin Baldwin, Sophia Boralli, Henry Bristol, Brady Burns, Madeleine Carnemark, Pallavi Chandashire, Lucas Chen, Wan-Lae Cheng, Andre Dua, Brendan Earle, Kweilin Ellingrud, Emily Field, Jason Forrest, Anne-Marie Frassica, Oscar González, Garo Hovnanian, Vijay Nattamai Jawaharlal, Raina Karia, Michael Lazar, Thomas Li, Ryan Luby, Kate Luther, Tom Martin, Vidur Nayyar, Shashwat Pathak, Matt Petric, Jose Maria Quiros, Samvitha Ram, Asha Rizor, Halima Said, Athreya Sampath, Saurabh Sanghvi, Srishti Sharma, Mallory Smith, Steven Smith, Ramesh Srinivasan, Sanjay Srinivasan, Liza Tullis, Tucker Van Aken, Stewart Vann, Amit Verma, Marius Westhoff, Edom Wessenyeleh, Claire Williams, Bryson Wong and Bob
Our work with Rework America Alliance highlights how a skills-based approach can help American employers expand talent pools and retain top workers, even in times of economic uncertainty.
Should employers limit themselves to considering only degrees when hiring?
The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, a potential recession, rising inflation rates1, and the Great Attrition2 have led employers to rethink their approach to human capital and talent management.
That is, they are moving beyond degrees and job titles to focus more on the skills a job requires and that a candidate possesses. And they are doing so in greater numbers, according to McKinsey research conducted in partnership with the Rework America Alliance, a collective that helps millions of workers from lower-wage jobs move into positions that offer higher wages, more economic mobility, and better resilience to automation.4
As a pro bono contribution to the alliance, we worked together to assess the opportunities and job progressions based on real skills that workers have achieved.
With this data, the team launched a series of practical tools, including a job progression tool that career counselors at community organizations like UnidosUS, the National Urban League, and Goodwill Industries International use to help unemployed workers gain better job prospects for the future.
Our real-life experiences, along with recent research from colleagues at McKinsey and others,
offer lessons on what it takes to implement a skills-based approach.
From seeking out new, nontraditional talent to creating better training programs for long-term career development, this approach is key to helping employers build and maintain a more inclusive workforce.
More and more employers are beginning to adopt skills-based hiring practices
Major companies, such as Boeing, Walmart, and IBM, have joined the Rework America Alliance6, the Business Roundtable’s Multiple Pathways program7, and the Tear the Paper Ceiling campaign8, committing to implementing skills-based practices.
So far, they have removed degree requirements from certain job postings and worked with other organizations to help workers progress from lower-wage jobs to higher-wage jobs.
Interest in skills-based internships is not limited to the private sector
In May 2022, the state of Maryland announced that it would no longer require degrees for nearly 50 percent of its positions, opening up thousands of jobs in healthcare, corrections, law enforcement, skilled trades, and engineering to a larger pool of applicants.9
Companies have recognized that skills-based internships are a powerful solution to challenges that have intensified since the pandemic.
Employers have struggled to find the right candidates for important open positions and then retain the talent they hire.
Through a skills-based approach, companies can increase the quantity and quality of applicants applying for open positions and can help workers find more opportunities to advance internally, which can help employers improve retention.
It also helps communities by creating more and better job opportunities for a larger, more diverse group of workers.
Attract and retain a broader talent pool
Skills-based practices help companies find and attract a broader talent pool filled with candidates who are better suited to fill these positions long-term.
Such practices also help open up opportunities for nontraditional candidates, including people without specific or typical credentials on their resumes, as well as women and people of color.
This year, the alliance hosted a ten-week Accelerator program
Designed to help employers adopt skills-based practices across their talent pipeline.
Participants were mostly small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), along with a few larger employers, based in the Atlanta, Minneapolis, Denver, and Austin areas.
The program consisted of four large workshops and separate one-on-one coaching sessions. During the coaching sessions, participants made significant changes to their talent strategies to align them with skills-based practices.
These changes often created an immediate impact. Participants indicated that creating skills-based job ads resulted in a substantial increase in applications from a broader pool of workers.
One participant noted that making a few adjustments to his job ad quadrupled the number of applicants from two or three the week before to 12 in the week after the new ad was posted. In the end, one successful candidate was hired when no applicants had previously passed resume review.
Attracting and Developing a Broader Pool of Talent
Another participant created a skills-based version of one of his job ads and went from getting one overqualified candidate for the position to 18 appropriately qualified applicants; One was hired and the rest were considered for other open positions in the organization.
This experience is shared by employers beyond the Accelerator program participants.
For example, a case study conducted by the alliance showed how a mid-sized healthcare provider created its own skills-based talent solution to address a shortage.
The organization needed nursing assistants with the right skills and qualifications, but was unable to get the right candidates.
They decided to train them from scratch, with two key changes: they removed on-the-job experience requirements from job postings and partnered with a local technical school to create a start-to-finish clinical training program. As a result, 200 new nursing assistants completed this clinical training.
Improving Internal Value Propositions
Skills-based hiring creates a more resilient workforce and can be an effective strategy for employers to prevent attrition, which is especially relevant in the era of COVID-19.10
Hiring for skills is five times more predictive of job performance than hiring for education and more than two times more predictive than hiring for work experience.
Workers without a degree also tend to stay in their jobs 34 percent longer than workers with a degree. Skills-based practices therefore enable employers to not only find the best workers, but also retain them at a time when it is historically difficult to do so. The approach saves time, energy, and resources while fostering a more diverse and better-prepared workforce.
Building a Better-Equipped Workforce
Last year, we shared how workers without a degree have proven they have the skills to access higher-paying and growing jobs.
In the face of a potential recession, skills-based practices provide a roadmap for workers to advance internally, allowing employees to progress within their current companies during a time when external hiring might slow.
In fact, there is an untapped opportunity for skills-based internal job progressions for workers. Many employers do not have strong structures in place for workers to advance in their positions, regardless of their background.
A 2018 survey from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)
found that 77 percent of employees who left their jobs could have stayed there, with a significant portion of them citing a lack of career development opportunities as a “difference-making” factor in their decision to leave.
And, as shared in our recent report on human capital at work, more than 80 percent of workers’ moves to new positions involve changing employers, suggesting that workers have the skills to advance but haven’t had the opportunity to do so internally.
Greater resilience in the face of recessions
Creating skills-based pathways for these workers can make employers more resilient in the face of a recession while also offering them better, more secure employment.
This approach allows employers to create deliberate pathways based on the skills an employee already has and close the skills gap to the next position.
Employers can proactively prepare for that progression: If they know what skills are needed for each role in their organization, they can identify skills gaps and overlaps between lower- and higher-level positions and create training and transition plans to help workers progress internally.
Employers in the Accelerator program expressed openness and enthusiasm for creating these upward pathways for workers
The methodology they learned during the sessions helped them visualize how to make these progressions happen systematically using skills-based practices, as well as how to prepare workers accordingly (see sidebar, “Climbing a Skills-Based Ladder”).
Despite the promise of skills-based practices, obstacles have prevented them from being adopted more widely. Some employers may understand how to implement “quick wins,” but feel less confident about how to apply the practices broadly or sustainably.
At the same time, workers (particularly those with lower incomes) may struggle to access the support needed to land jobs in new industries that require some additional training.
For employers
Many employers have found it difficult to implement skills-based practices across the entire talent journey beyond the initial stages—getting it right involves more than just removing college degrees from job requirements.
Identifying transferable skills and creating accessible opportunities
We conducted a survey prior to the launch of the Employer Accelerator program, in which participants cited sourcing, skills validation, and scaling skills-based practices across the organization as three of the most common challenges they faced when implementing a skills-based approach.
These results echoed what we heard in our survey of nearly 300 SMBs conducted in late 2021, in which respondents cited sourcing and validation as the top two hiring and talent challenges their companies faced.
Employers reported that skills validation and search were their top challenges
Employers were unsure of how to determine which jobs (particularly lower-paying
