The language used in education shapes policy, practice, and perceptions. Edge’s latest series asks, ‘What’s in a word?’ and scrutinises the impact of the terminology we commonly employ.
There is something strangely triggering about the term ‘soft skills’.
For 15 years, I’ve led Skills Builder Partnership with the goal of ensuring that every learner develops the essential skills to thrive. We talk about interpersonal, communication, creative problem solving, and self-management skills. And people often check, do you mean soft skills? I’ve sat at enough roundtables, spoken on enough conference panels, and had enough debates on what we call these skills to satisfy several lifetimes. I yearn to move the debate on – and yet, there is clearly something much deeper at work here.
What’s in a name
The origination of the term ‘soft skills’ is widely cited as being in the US Army in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hard skills were those that related to working with machines, the rest were soft skills. I think the biggest argument for the term soft skills is that it reflects their malleability – they can be used in many different settings. But their contrast with hard skills can also unhelpfully imply that soft skills are easy skills. The term transferable skills carries a little less baggage. It explains these are skills which can be transferred into other settings, although they will need to be applied appropriately in each new setting. Our learning at Skills Builder is that this transferability is not automatic – it requires encoding a skill in one setting, recognising its application in another, and appropriate contextualisation and combination with domain knowledge. Unfortunately, if this nuance is lost it is too easy to argue that transferable skills don’t really exist and that only domain-specific knowledge and technical skills matter.
Although now very passé, there was a moment when 21st century skills were all the rage until it was reasonably pointed out that the ability to communicate, create, plan or solve problems are hardly unique to the current era. The argument could be made that demand for higher levels of these skills is growing. For example, NFER’s latest research on, ahem, essential employment skills shows that a growing proportion of jobs will require higher levels of these skills. Aspiring to similar urgency and timeliness are those calling for human skills. One could argue that surely any skill that a human can enact is a human skill, but of course the point is to contrast with the repetitive processes and information recall where technology is leaving us behind.
Or another angle is to emphasise their utility, as employability skills. There is ample evidence that having higher levels of these skills increases earnings and job satisfaction. But these are also skills that are relevant for navigating our lives outside of workplaces, sustaining relationships, and contributing to society. At Skills Builder, we decided to use the language of essential skills to reflect their utility in education, employment and wider life but we recognise that no label is perfect. We’ve not even mentioned that these debates are happening in international context - see Australia’s core skills or Chinese Hong Kong’s generic skills.
Under the bonnet
The good news is when people look beyond the name, there is considerably more agreement about what these skills involve. The four big areas that come up consistently are communication, collaboration, creative problem solving, and self-management. Of course, one can slice and dice these skills in endless ways. One can argue ad infinitum whether it is better to talk of creativity or creative thinking, what overlap exists between problem solving and critical thinking, and whether communication or oracy should be the terminology. But I tend to think it’s not the best use of our collective energies to keep debating these terms, given there is near consensus about the underlying concepts and their importance for work and life. Where we really need a collective push is around teaching these skills. We need to make sure that all young people are being equipped for future success. This means less time talking about what these skills are, and more time spent on how we can help learners develop them.
At Skills Builder Partnership, we developed the Universal Framework that underpins our work and that of our partners. All of us are educators who want to support learners in developing high levels of these skills. The most important thing to know about the Framework is that it provides step-by-step guidance, getting under the bonnet of what each of these skills involves. In the same way that there are many steps involved in learning to swim or drive, we need to recognise the steps involved in becoming a confident communicator, problem solver, self-organiser and team player. Just as we would not teach swimming by launching the learner into the deep end, nor driving by sending learners straight onto the motorway, we cannot assume that young people will magically acquire these skills. Instead, we breakdown the skills into teachable steps that can be practiced and built over time – like being able to listen to a colleague, put parameters around a question, define success criteria, create and test hypotheses, and so on.
Looking forward
There is no doubt that soft skills are essential skills. They boost learning in school, reduce the likelihood of falling out of employment or training, increase earnings, and meaningfully increase life satisfaction. I’m hugely grateful that there are 900+ organisations driving widespread use of the Universal Framework to enable them to have greater impact in building learners’ skills. By agreeing (and compromising!) on the language, we can focus on bigger issues and opportunities. Not what to call these skills, but how do we ensure that every learner achieves their full potential in them.
Tom Ravenscroft is Founder and CEO at Skills Builder Partnership. Skills Builder Partnership brings together a global group of more than 950 partners in twenty countries around a common language and approach to building essential skills like teamwork, communication, and self-management. The Partnership, which includes education institutions, employers and impact organisations, reached more than 1.8million individuals in the last year.
Next time: Prue Huddleston, University of Warwick, explores what is meant when an initiative is said to be ‘employer-led’.