Dear Lou, I follow your postings and find them very important. I noticed that there was some inconvenience in using the term “soft skills”. Since I have been doing some research into fields related to organizational cultures and collaborative activity, here are some concepts which shed light on this subject and can be helpful in finding better terms to deal with these skills. Every non-routine occupation, irrespective of industry or organizational role, requires three main competences: (1) technical "hard skills", (2) cognitive and (3) implementation. Technical refers to skills and knowledge base which are pertinent to specific and unique functions that constitute the role of a dentist, a quarterback, a police officer, a pre-K teacher, a technical recruiter, a butcher, etc. Each of these occupations has its own subject matter to be proficient in and a set of specific processes to be skilled at. However, on top of that, there are cognitive competences which transcend narrow fields of particular occupations. In many contemporary roles you have to think, and this activity is not something you are born with: it needs to be developed and extensively practiced since early childhood. I am speaking about activities that pertain to cognitive mapping (i.e. understanding of what is going on) and cognitive engineering (finding solutions beyond routines). Finally, in addition to the technical and cognitive abilities, a successful professional needs to master the implementation competence: in this day and age, one has to know how to (a) plan, (b) organize, (c) manage teams/counterparts through (d) communication and (e) manage oneself (continuous learning, staying on course, countering setbacks, managing time, recharging batteries, etc.) in order to put the above technical and cognitive competences to work. You can look at a more detailed discussion of this topic at my website which I recently launched to address parents’ role in education (reasoncraft/concepts/reasoning-concepts/). If you look at the “soft-skills” this way, you will certainly see that the technical expertise is just one (probably minor) piece in the mosaic. If we focus on performance on the job, one cannot survive at an organization without strong and proven cognitive and implementation competences. Hope this is helpful in dealing with the “soft skills” term. Kind regards
Posted on: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 14:39:52 +0000
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