We produced a list of the 25 most in-demand skills earlier this year, including mobile development, channel marketing and economics. As you may have seen, every talent on the list is a “hard skill" or a set of specialized skills needed to perform a job that can be learnt.
That's why we were astonished to hear from our recruiters who said they were having trouble finding people with necessary “soft skills” or personal characteristics that help people connect effectively with others, such as communication, teamwork, and critical thinking. Hard talents differ by career, but soft skills are essential in all positions. A cook for instance must be able to carefully dice the vegetables, whereas a server does not. However, in order for the restaurant they work in to function, both must be team players and communicate successfully. As a result, Soft talents are incredibly desirable, and the growing scarcity of them give professionals like you to stand a chance out.
That is why we used the economic graph to explore what we could find out about soft skills. Master in-demand Professional Soft Skills - learning path designed to help people master the most in-demand soft skills - is the result of our study.
Here's what we found out
Soft Skills might be difficult to come by:
We Polled 291 hiring managers in the US to find out how difficult it was to locate individuals with the proper soft skills for each of the positions they were filling. They indicated it's difficult to locate someone with the proper soft skills for 59% of their available positions.
Top 10 most in-demand Soft Skills
To discover the most sought-after soft skills among employers, we studied the soft skills listed on the profiles of members who job-hopped (defined as a person changing their company) between June 2014 and June 2015.
In some industries, soft skills are more prevalent
Finally, we determined which industries had the most and least common soft skills amongst professionals. The following lists show which industries have the largest and lowest need for soft skills, as well as they are most and least appreciated.
The following are the Top 10 industries where Soft Skills are required
The list of in-demand Soft Skills was compiled from a total of 58 Soft-Skills that were manually vetted prior to the study.
