TOP 15 SOFT SKILLS FOR 2025 AND HOW TO ACQUIRE AND HONE THOSE SKILLS

Everyone is focused on hard skills, but the events and trials of the past year have caused businesses to realize that certain soft skills are becoming more important, even critical, to the success of an organization.?

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs 2020 report identified the top 15 soft-skills which employers see as rising in prominence in the lead up to 2025.?I have grouped those skills into 3 categories: Relationships, Critical Thinking, and Technology.

Learning new hard skills usually has a very clear trajectory and plenty of readily available training opportunities.?Soft skills on the other hand have mostly been learned through experience.?With these soft skills becoming a greater critical factor in identifying the best candidates for a job, people don’t have the luxury of time that is required with the “learn as you go” path.

(Note that WEF included a number of technical/technology-related skills on this list.?I personally believe these are in fact hard skills, not soft skills.?As these skills are all skills that require specific degrees, classes, training, and/or certifications, I will not be addressing them in this article.)

That being said, how can people go about acquiring and honing these critical soft skills??This article will provide you with some tips, recommendations, and even some courses that can help you elevate your soft skills value proposition.

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Relationships

Relationship skills can be defined as the ability to establish and maintain healthy and rewarding relationships with diverse individuals and groups. This includes communicating clearly, listening actively, cooperating, resisting inappropriate social pressure, negotiating conflict constructively, and seeking and offering help when needed.

One of the key skills is Emotional Intelligence.?Emotional Intelligence or EI is your ability to recognize your own emotions, and better understand what they're telling you. By developing your EI, you'll become more adept at identifying and handling the emotions and needs of others.?As your emotional intelligence grows, you will have a solid foundation to begin to excel in the other sought-after Relationship soft skills.

If you don’t think emotional intelligence is something worth learning and developing, consider this statistic.?The Center for Creative Leadership draws on research to suggest that 75% of careers are negatively impacted by emotional competency-related themes. These include the inability to respond adaptively to change, nurture trust, lead teams during tough times, and deal effectively with interpersonal problems.

Even though emotional intelligence is only one of six Relationship skills on the list, it is the foundation that the remaining five skills are built on. To make it even more appealing to start with the emotional intelligence skill, all of the other Relationship skills are generally addressed as part of a comprehensive emotional intelligence learning program.

“Of the 34 most important workplace skills, Emotional Intelligence is the strongest predictor of performance – 1 full 58% of success in all types of jobs.” – Talent Smart

There are a number of free and low-cost websites, courses, and certifications available to learn and develop your emotional intelligence, but I have found one of the best places to start is https://positivepsychology.com/category/emotional-intelligence/.?It is one of the best websites to learn about and build skills to develop your emotional intelligence— for free.?The website provides information, charts, tools, activities, and exercises to help you understand what emotional intelligence is, determine what your current Emotional Quotient (EQ) measurement is, and identify ways to build and expand for emotional intelligence.

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Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action (https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766).

?Effective critical thinking follows a path: OBSERVATION > ANALYSIS > INFERENCE > CONCEPTUALIZATION > DECISION-MAKING > PROBLEM SOLVING

An article by Helen Lee Bouygues, published in the Harvard Business Review, titled “3 Simple Habits to Improve Your Critical Thinking” contains great tools and recommendations for developing your critical thinking skills (https://hbr.org/2019/05/3-simple-habits-to-improve-your-critical-thinking). Since critical thinking is a learned skill, deliberately practicing these 3 simple skills on a daily basis can help you stand out from others in the job market.

1. Question assumptions
2. Reason through logic
3. Diversify thought

Another great critical thinking training idea I came across was to think in reverse. This changes your perspective so that you can look at the problem or situation from a completely different angle. It also allows you to open up your mind, think big, and not allow yourself to be limited by what is possible.

Future Focused Learning has created an excellent Critical Thinking cheatsheet that provides great questions to ask yourself when you discover or discuss new information.

As the first step in being a critical thinker is almost always Observation, improving your active listening skills is crucial. Try these effective listening practices:

1. Stop talking – When someone else is talking, be silent. Don’t interrupt, comment, make sounds, etc.
2. Concentrate on what the other person is saying, not what your response is going to be. Making eye contact with the speaker can help you focus better on what they are saying.
3. Be comfortable with silence.
4. Practice repeating back to the person what you heard them saying.
5. Be aware of your personal prejudices and biases and how they might impact what you are hearing (as opposed to what the speaker is saying) and how you interpret what you are hearing.
6. Be very aware of non-verbal communications, tone, and word emphasis as these can tell you a lot about the speaker and what they may not be sharing with you.

Lastly, try taking an online course on building your critical thinking skills. There are a number of sites where you will have access to courses that are taught at some of the world’s best institutions.?Here are three of the top sites (edX is one of my favorites).

edX - https://www.edx.org/learn/critical-thinking-skills

Coursera - https://www.coursera.org/courses?query=critical%20thinking

Udemy - https://www.udemy.com/topic/critical-thinking/

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Once you have developed these in-demand soft skills, how do you effectively incorporate them into your resume?

First, you want to identify the appropriate soft skills based on your review of the job posting and your research of the company that you are applying to. Once you have identified the appropriate soft skills, determine what hard skills (and quantifiable accomplishments, if possible) you can use to demonstrate those soft skills.

Effectively integrating hard skills and soft skills on your resume into a strategic and compelling resume value proposition statement or accomplishment can differentiate you from other candidates and help sell your uniques value proposition. ?Give your resume that WHAT -> HOW -> WOW factor!

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