GOI Launches Human Skills Working Group
February 16, 2023
Hard skills get you hired, but soft skills get you fired. So goes an adage among business leaders. That adage may be truer now more than ever.
For years, the demand for soft skills—such as communication, creativity, and problem solving—has been steadily climbing. According to a McKinsey survey, companies are also increasingly prioritizing soft skills in the reskilling programs they offer employees.
Though demand has increased, soft skills have proven difficult to teach and assess. How do people learn soft skills? Can they be learned? What does competency in soft skills look like?
To answer questions like these, the GOI is organizing a Human Skills Working Group to better understand how “human skills”—synonymous with “soft skills”—can be taught and assessed in the workforce.
The working group will be led by Charlie Boyle, CEO of CXEI (Customer Experience Excellence Ireland), an Ireland-based consultancy that helps businesses craft customer experiences.
In a recent interview for the GOI podcast, Boyle explained his agenda for the working group. “I think we’ve named” the human skills, said Boyle. “It’s time now to move on. How do we create modules for learning? How do we use those modules for learning?”
Not long ago, Boyle remarked, it was believed that human skills, like empathy and comfort with ambiguity, could not be taught. Indeed, they weren’t seen as skills at all but as innate attributes. But that view has begun to change.
“There was a belief—was there not?—that these were things you were born with or you weren’t,” said Boyle. “But we must move on from that, and we must now know we can train.”
The working group will build on research by a team at MIT’s J-WEL. In 2019, researchers led by George Westerman and Glenda Stump at MIT identified “24 durable human skills that workers need to thrive in today’s rapidly evolving organizations.” The J-WEL team has merged these 24 skills into what they have called “The Human Skills Matrix,” or HSX.
The HSX has offered a language for schools, businesses, and policymakers to create learning programs for human skills. Now, the challenge will be to implement the HSX in practice.
“Employers knew human skills were important, but they didn’t have the language to articulate it,” said Gilda Colin, Global Curriculum Designer at McKinsey Social Initiative, at a 2020 workshop hosted by J-WEL soon after the HSX was released. “And I think people have always valued and appreciated this type of skill. We now have the language to call them out.”
Assessing these skills remains a challenge, Colin emphasized: “How do you make sure that assessment is rigorous? How do you make sure that it’s objective?”
As automation and AI spread into more fields, human skills are expected to become even more important. Workforces will need to do what AI can’t: be creative, solve problems, empathize, and communicate effectively. But it remains to be seen how businesses and schools can best teach and credential human skills, which have been elusive targets.
“There’s a lot of questions, a lot of work to be done,” says Boyle. “And it’s a responsibility we’re looking forward to.”
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