Most Changing Skills

soft skills depends very much on the context and one’s personal awareness. However, there is one property that directly comes to most people’s mind when soft skills are mentioned: those are the communication skills. And indeed, it is the talent of communication skills, which is mostly lacking among graduates from colleges and universities (Schulz, 2008).

The next more commonly cited skill was critical thinking, although there was significant argument about its definition and how it related to other intellectual skills. Critical thinking requires an attitude of open-mindedness, an ability to accept vagueness and to question one’s own opinions, and an responsiveness of the impact of emotion and individual experience on one’s views (Cukier et al., 2015).

“Creativity will become one of the top skills workers will need. With the avalanche of new products, new technologies and new ways of working, workers are going to have to become more creative in order to benefit from these changes. Robots may help us get to where we want to be faster, but they can’t be as creative as humans. Whereas negotiation and flexibility/adaptability are high on the list of skills for 2015, in 2020 they will begin to drop from the top 10 as machines, using masses of data, begin to make our decisions” (World Economic forum, 2016).

Reference

Cukier, W., Hodson, J. and Omar, A. (2015) “Soft skills are hard” a review of the literature. Ryerson University.

Schulz, B.  (2008) The Importance of Soft Skills: Education beyond academic knowledge. Journal of Language and Communication.146

World Economic Forum (2016) The future of jobs, employment, skills and workforce strategy for the fourth industrial revolution. [online] Geneva:World Economic Forum. Available from http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs.pdf [Accessed 13 December 2018]