Soft Skills Enablement

Literally, the term "soft skills" can be traced to the U.S. Army efforts after creating its Human Resource Research Organization aka HumRRO. However, upon close inspection you may find that the context in which it was examined in 1972 does not mirror what is mostly understood today as soft skills. My guest in this exciting episode is Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi, an entrepreneurial woman, CEO and co-founder of the Dextego platform. Dextego is a soft skills training and coaching tool that uses Artificial Intelligence (Ai) to provide personalized feedback for team leaders. Ioanna and I had an interesting discussion of the origins of soft skills and their value in the ever evolving world of workplace learning.

"...job related skills involving actions affecting primarily people and paper, e.g. , inspecting troops, supervising, office personnel, conducting studies, preparing maintenance reports, preparing efficiency reports, designing bridge structures".

What are Soft Skills?

In December of 1972, the Continental Army Command or CONARC held a conference specifically addressing training approaches to soft skills. One notable presentation was from none other than Dr. Robert Mager 1923-2020, which propose applying the same systems engineering method to the development of soft skills which later became known to the world as ADDIE. Another presenter, Dr. Paul Whitmore from HumRRO offered CONARC's 1968 definition of soft skills as "...job related skills involving actions affecting primarily people and paper, e.g. , inspecting troops, supervising, office personnel, conducting studies, preparing maintenance reports, preparing efficiency reports, designing bridge structures". It can be observed that some of these actions are related to soft skills as we know them today, but many are not and that's because the Army considered anything that was not operating equipment a "soft skill". The following image shows a 1970 excerpt from officer candidate training labeling leadership as a soft skill.

A better notion of soft skills

In my opinion, the U.S. Army started the discussion although in a very different context. After 50 years, we have a stronger focus for soft skills to be related primarily to communication, motivation, and other human factors. A literature review by Botke et al., 2018, cited soft skills to fall in these categories:

1. Communication skills,
2. Leadership skills
3. Decision making/problem solving skills
4. Self-management skills
5. Management skills
6. Organization skills
7. Interpersonal skills
8. Political skills
9. Analysis/creativity skills
10. Selling skills

Very interesting right? Well, listen to my discussion with Ioanna and how Dextego addresses these.