Lily Scherlis at Harper’s Magazine:
Soft-skills researchers have themselves been mired in their own long crisis. None of them have convincingly determined what a “soft skill” even is, despite decades of research. “There is still lack of consensus regarding the definitions,” a team of management scientists wrote in a 2022 article entitled “Soft Skills, Do We Know What We Are Talking About?” Social scientists patch together definitions from an inconsistent taxonomy of subskills: communication skills, interpersonal skills, empathy, emotional intelligence, problem-solving skills, teamwork and collaboration, critical thinking, flexibility, creativity, leadership and social influence, resilience, adaptability. One group of management researchers attempted to connect the dots in 2023, writing that these skills are “non-technical and non-reliant on abstract reasoning involving interpersonal and intrapersonal abilities to facilitate mastered performance in particular social contexts.” USAID researchers once inventoried a whopping seventy-four different metrics for measuring soft skills; they found that the most common parameter was “self-control.”
more here.
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