Home>Why soft skills are essential
03.12.2024
Why soft skills are essential
Rapidly changing jobs, skills requirements under continual revision, ever-shifting working methods and conditions: such is the landscape of business today. Today more than ever, we need the right soft skills and behavioural competencies to keep pace with these changes.
Agility, stress management, teamwork, and the ability to acquire new knowledge - these qualities are increasingly being scrutinised by companies and recruiters alike. Now seen as an essential counterpart to hard skills (technical abilities and knowledge), soft skills like these are making their way onto CVs and into job interviews, even for highly technical profiles such as engineers.
These social and emotional skills appear to have become vitally relevant if we are to keep up with the rapidly changing world of work. First and foremost, they help us navigate uncertainty and cope with national and international events that can impact a company, its markets and its organisation, from health and social crises to global conflicts and inflationary rollercoasters.
Besides all this, managers are facing jobs changing faster than ever, along with the skill sets required to perform them. The digital revolution is playing a major role in this shift, with artificial intelligence poised to profoundly disrupt many of our professions. “We are increasingly seeing the automation of routine tasks,” explains Jérémy Lamri, Affiliate Professor at Sciences Po Executive Education and co-founder of Lab RH. “This is shifting employee focus to the more complex tasks, those that involve problem-solving. But to do this, well beyond just technical skills, soft skills such as creativity and teamwork are key.”
The ecological transition will clearly be another key driver of business transformation. According to a 2023 study by APEC (French association for executive employment)*, 64% of managers believe that it will have a significant impact on what their jobs will look like in the future. Here too, soft skills will be invaluable in successfully seeing this transformation through.
Working conditions are also undergoing major change. One of the most striking examples is the exponential growth of remote working since the Covid-19 crisis. Working methods have been revised accordingly, fuelled, among other factors, by the aspirations of young graduates, which include more feedback between managers and employees, greater interaction, and increased cross-functional collaboration. These profound changes make adaptability, communication and teamwork valuable skills for driving progress within organisations.
5 ESSENTIAL SOFT SKILLS FOR THE FUTURE
This is the one skill whose importance is on the rise in companies. Agility enables employees and, by extension, teams to stay on track in the face of profound, sometimes unpredictable change affecting organisations. It goes hand in hand with the ability to learn, a key quality for thriving in new environments.
Sciences Po Executive Education offers a number of leadership programmes to support you.
Faced with the myriad of problems companies have to solve, one must be able to clearly convey messages and listen to them carefully. Understanding communication mechanisms is underscored with the increase in remote working, which requires mastering the specifics of remote communication.
This is a skill that recruiters today specifically seek out. And with good reason: no business objective can be achieved in isolation, owing to the cross-functional nature of projects. Organisations need collective intelligence, which in turn depends on the employee’s ability to find their place within a group and collaborate effectively.
The surge in remote working has brought renewed focus to this skill within companies. It involves taking initiative and independently organising one’s work to meet objectives, including time management and prioritisation.
“A critical skill for any company’s survival,” says Jérémy Lamri. It helps us to stay informed, compare different opinions and identify both risks and opportunities. It prevents both managers and organisations from stagnating.
*Apec (Association for the Employment of Executives) study published in 2023
