Rebranding “Soft Skills” to Essential Skills: A New Take on Professional Development
When I was first starting out in the geospatial industry, I spent time joining several geospatial organizations, such as Esri Young Professionals Network (YPN) and URISA, now known as the Geospatial Professional Network (GPN). During my first few months in the industry, I was fortunate to have several mentors and an opportunity with the URISA Mentoring Network. One of the most memorable pieces of advice I received from this was to prioritize developing skills. This led me down an investigation of what skills to learn. The two groups of skills I found were hard skills and soft skills.
At the GIS Pro Conference in October 2024, I presented on this topic. During my research for the presentation, I found several articles discussing hard/soft skills. In the majority of the articles, I would find the two groups to be conflicting, i.e. hard skills versus soft skills. I remembered when I was building my skill set, and realized I had prioritized mainly hard, technical skills. After all, the geospatial world is highly technical. I believed that solely learning these technical skills, such as knowing ArcGIS software, programming languages, and database skills would be sufficient to progress in my career. While having these skills is useful, I drastically over prioritized developing these skills over “soft skills”.
After all, soft does have a passive connotation. When I thought about learning hard skills and soft skills, my subconscious mind perceived hard skills as more important. As a result, early in my career I focused very heavily on these technical skills and did not spend enough time developing soft skills. Now that I look at the definition of soft skills, which can loosely be defined as a “set of personal attributes that allow individuals to effectively interact with others in a professional setting”, I realize how important these skills are. I believe that soft skills are heavily undervalued and need to be prioritized more in professional development.
I propose that we rebrand the term soft skills to essential skills.
I would tweak the definition of soft skills to define essential skills as a “set of fundamental abilities that allow individuals to succeed in personal and professional settings on a daily basis”.
Some of the key essential skills would include:
- Problem-solving
- Adaptability
- Communication
- Time management
- Teamwork/Collaboration
While I was in a deep dive working on developing this rebrand idea, I thought about why soft skills haven’t already been rebranded to date. I found a few reasons for this:
- There is a historical focus on gaining hard skills. Many people will tell you to learn python or take an ESRI MOOC. Both are great suggestions, however very few people will tell you to work on developing your teamwork skills.
- Many organizations have prioritized “hard” results over “soft” developments. Several times my team has said “this needs to get done by the end of the week” and on very few occasions my team has said “let’s take extra time so you can work on your communication”.
- Soft skills are difficult to measure/quantify. Hard, technical skills are very easy to conceptualize and evaluate. Soft skills, on the other hand, are perceived to be more difficult to evaluate.
The third reason is one I’d like to focus on, as I would argue there are methods for measuring essential skills.
- Self assessments create opportunities for reflection to assess specific essential skill development or address essential skills that need improvement. For example, after a major project, I could perform a self assessment to specifically focus on aspects of my time management during that project’s duration. I would focus on the different phases of the project, and how efficient I was with my time, noting positives when I was productive and obstacles when I was less effective.
- If you are fortunate to have a positive mentor or coworker, utilizing peer feedback is another great method. The reason why peer feedback is so useful is that you receive an outside look into how your essential skills are perceived. For example, you may perform a self assessment on your communication skills and be overly critical of yourself. If you also seek peer feedback, you may learn that your communication skills were effective from your manager or coworkers point of view. On the other hand, they may point out a situation where you could have improved (i.e. that email was a bit confusing and could have been explained a bit more).
- Using the STAR method. STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result (see image to the right). While some of you have heard of this used in interviews, I apply this technique to other areas of my career, such as measuring the growth of my essential skills. Using this method, I highlight an aspect of an essential skill I feel I’ve made progress in recently. Here’s a simplified example:
During the duration of this project over the past 3 months, I was tasked with keeping communication between relevant stakeholders. I sent weekly emails and regularly checked in with each member. This resulted in the project finishing within the specified deadline.
Let’s break this down:
- Situation - During the duration of this project over the past 3 months
- Task - I was tasked with keeping communication between relevant stakeholders
- Action - I sent weekly emails and regularly checked in with each member
- Result - This resulted in the project finishing within the specified deadline
(Your STAR outlines will likely be more complex. This is mainly to get the point across)
In conclusion, I propose that we rebrand the term soft skills to essential skills. While hard technical skills are valuable in early-career development, the over-emphasis on these hard skills will result in an unbalanced young professional. I advocate that alongside this rebrand, young professionals across the geospatial industry will value essential skills on the same level as these technical skills. Ultimately, this will enhance the overall community and redefine the commonly found and required skill sets across the geospatial career.
Photo References:
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/hard-skills-vs-soft-skills-2063780
https://www.istockphoto.com/illustrations/tilted-scale
https://codecapsule.com/2021/07/11/unlock-your-soft-skills-to-win-the-career-game/
https://www.s1jobs.com/blog/star-interview-technique-method-example-questions/