Deputy monarch of Jobs and Skills Australia Megan Lilly has made a strong case for killing off the term ‘soft skills’.
“Australia’s skills system still treats human capabilities as “soft”—and it’s costing productivity, mobility and fairness. It’s time to name these skills, value them properly and embed them in how we educate, hire and recognise,” Ms Lilly writes in the JSA blog.
It’s hard to argue that the ‘soft’ term should be retained, given that the capabilities summed up with this term are almost always cited by employers as the most valuable, and yet are defined with diminishing categorisation.
“There is nothing soft about de‑escalating a tense situation, coordinating across cultures, communicating with clarity, or exercising ethical judgment under pressure. These are the hard edge of modern workplace performance—yet our language, and too often our systems, keep treating them as optional extras,” Ms Lilly writes.
“When we downplay these capabilities, we don’t just insult the people who use them every day; we distort how value is created at work. We overlook training that lifts real world performance. We reduce mobility for workers whose strengths don’t come wrapped in a technical certification. And we send the wrong signals to educators, employers and regulators about what really matters.”
Skills such as communication, negotiation and problem-solving are frequently key to roles in feminised sectors such as aged care, community services and early childhood education – but are also highly valued across other sectors.
Developing a common language for skills that doesn’t diminish key competencies and better defines and describes core skills is apparently one of the many things that JSA is working on at the moment.
Whether we get a new term in common usage to replace the soft skills catch all is not yet clear – JSA is focused on describing each individual skill more objectively. ‘Attributes displayed by decent humans’ is a little verbose; ‘Productivity skills’ perhaps has a chance?