[8][9] PG Whitmore cited the CON Reg 350-100-1 definition: "job-related skills involving actions affecting primarily people and paper, e.g., inspecting troops, supervising office personnel, conducting studies, preparing maintenance reports, preparing efficiency reports, designing bridge structures.
Their ductility helps "people to adapt and behave positively so that they can deal effectively with the challenges of their professional and everyday life".
A 2019 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management found that three-quarters of employers have a hard time finding graduates with the soft skills their companies need.
[22] This is because surveys can be subject to bias and having multiple sources such as self, teacher, peer and parental reporting can provide unique perspectives on student's skills as well as infer latent personality (John and De Fruyt, 2014).
[23] In addition, anchoring vignettes is another a method that can be implemented to lessen biases and increase data quality as well as improve cross-cultural comparability of soft skill assessments (King, Murray, Salomon, and Tandon, 2003;[24] Kyllonen and Bertling, 2014[25]).
[29] The study carried out by professor Zhang of Georgia Southern University, although with few participants, "is an initial step in designing and validating a peer assessment scale".
It says, "to remain competitive, workers will need to acquire new skills continually, which requires flexibility, a positive attitude towards lifelong learning and curiosity".
[31] Research has been conducted investigating the transfer of soft skills and knowledge through formats such as play (DeKorver, Choi and Town, 2017[32]) as well as project-based learning (Lee and Tsai, 2004[33]).
Another key finding from the literature is that in order to maximize benefits of soft skills over the long-term, they should be focused on young children particularly from the age of 1 – 9 years old.
Nobel prize winners Heckman and Kautz (2012[34]) provided evidence of this in their analysis of the Perry Preschool Soft Skills program, where they found how personality traits can be changed in ways that produce beneficial life outcomes.
The program involved teaching social skills to 3 and 4-year-old children from low income black families with initial IQ scores below 85 at age 3.
Evidence from other studies are consistent with the findings from the Perry Preschool Program, such as data from Project STAR (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio) carried out by Krueger and Whitmore (2001[35]) and Project PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies) that teaches self-control, emotional awareness and social-problem skills aimed at elementary school children (Bierman et al., 2010[36]).
Both studies have found implementing soft skills education to small groups of children at a young age have led to significantly higher wages in early adulthood compared to their peers and other lifetime successes (Dee and West, 2011;[37] Durlak et al., 2011[38]).
With increasing automation, purely cognitive or professional skills no longer suffice to navigate this VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) (Yeo, 2019,[40] OECD 2015.
[22] According to the OECD's Skills Outlook 2019 report, life-long learning or metacognition, is becoming more necessary for employment and for handling a future environment of increased uncertainty.
While "soft skills" have become increasingly taught in educational programs worldwide, some scholars have shown the inconsistent usage of the term, as well as the ways it is used to control, rather than empower, employees.
Deborah Cameron, for example, shows that the growing focus on "communication" skills among service providers in the UK has limited workers' forms of expression and produced uniform conversational codes.
[43] Kori Allan demonstrates that state-run integration programs for new immigrants in Canada, employ the focus on soft skills so that individuals adopt the interpersonal cultural norms of Canadian society.
As Gil Hizi shows, rather than being treated as objectively recognized abilities necessary for the job market, people in China who foster soft skills regard themselves as becoming more individualistic and cosmopolitan in contrast to the demands of their local culture.
[47] ◦ Brieuc du Roscoät, Romaric Servajean-Hilst, Sébastien Bauvet and Rémi Lallement(2022), Soft skills related to innovation and organizational transformation.