ILPC 2027

Assessing Soft Skills

Abstract

Over the last thirty years ‘soft skills’ have emerged as a key feature of employment.  To the extent that Cappelli (1995) has argued that many recruitment difficulties stem from a shortage of appropriate attitudes rather than technical skills.  In the workplace an emphasis on soft skills can mask a variety of prejudices in which evaluations of such ‘skills’ are effectively proxies for gender, race or class (Reskin and Roos 1990).  A process which is exaggerated by the way work is designed and the way workers are expected to inhabit their jobs (Skuratowicz and Hunter 2004; Pierce 1995; AUTHORS).

Academic studies of soft skills are often split between detailed accounts of the work involved which emphasise complexity (Bolton 2005; Bolton and Boyd 2003; Bolton and Houlihan 2005; Tsoukas and Vladimirou 2001; Wray-Bliss 2001) or contextual critiques which stress normalcy and simplicity (Payne 2006, 2009).  Yet few aspects of workplace life are either irretrievably complex or deterministically simple and soft skills are, in practice, remarkably varied.  Moreover skill has always been a political and a politicised term: Cockburn (1983) made ‘skill in the social setting’ part of her definition of skill. 

This paper is an attempt to clarify and classify the way that soft skills are used at work.  It draws on data from an EPSRC-funded research project into retail work, focussing particularly on supermarket managers.  It assesses their work against five categories, all drawn from existing studies of (technical) skills: discretion, complexity, knowledge/expertise, problem solving and responsibility.  Soft skills will never be easy to gauge, but this is a quality they share with most other types of skill and most jobs.  The solution to these difficulties is not to dismiss any attempt at analysis, nor to limit it to a binary scale which measures only simple or complex factors but to assess against a range of activities.  This paper is one step in that direction.

318 words

References

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