Why it’s time we stopped talking about ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ skills

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The way we discuss skills at work is stuck in the past. For decades, we’ve used the simplistic binary of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ skills to describe different aspects of our job, but if we’re going to survive in the workplaces of the future, we need better language.

Let’s begin with what we mean by hard and soft skills, a categorisation first used by the US Army in the 1960s. They coined the terms in training manuals to distinguish between capabilities required to operate heavy military machines and those needed when dealing with “people and paper”.

The definition has since broadened to hard skills covering anything that requires specialised knowledge or high technical ability, like bookkeeping, data analysis, logistics, IT, coding research and hundreds of other categories with a traditionally steep learning curve.

Soft skills, on the other hand, include communication, teamwork, creativity, leadership, critical thinking and others. The list of occupations this covers includes teachers, salespeople, HR, customer service and dozens more.

As a descriptive term, it’s woefully inadequate. For the last few years I’ve been researching a book on conflict in the workplace. To better understand it, I studied at the University of Western Australia’s Mediation Clinic to become a nationally accredited mediator.

To give ourselves the best chance of succeeding, we’ll need all the skills we’ve got.

The course teachers, Professor Jill Howieson and Dr Darren Moroney, often express their frustration that people believe practising active listening, compassion and mediating is easy.

“In every course we teach, someone says ‘it’s like singing Kumbaya’,” says Howieson, referring to the feel-good song that’s usually associated with ignoring real conflict or problems. “They’ll say it’s a soft skill.”

Moroney shakes his head at this suggestion. “The only people that call mediation a soft skill are the ones that can’t do it.”

The new AI era we are entering is changing how we think about the skills we’re going to need. Hard skills are becoming easier and soft skills are getting harder.

AI allows previously difficult and technical work to be completed in seconds, but it’s incapable of solving our human problems, which are just getting more complicated. We need a better way of talking about how to future-proof our jobs.

This thought has been circulating in my head since I wrote about the top five skills we’re going to need this year, which were judgment, storytelling, collaborative intelligence, conflict management and unlearning.

What they all have in common is that the future versions of these will involve humans and machines learning how to work together effectively. So instead of the traditional binary of hard and soft skills, we need a third category, complex skills, that encompasses this.

Complex skills are the tricky ones that live in the messy middle between people, technology and organisations, and require a unique combination of abilities.

To keep up with, and excel, in tomorrow’s workplace you’ll need to mix AI proficiency with making empathetic calls, and use just as much emotional intelligence as you do artificial. Managing AI agents and humans at the same time will require a new and complex set of skills, which is why it needs its own category.

The language we use at work matters. When we call something ‘soft’, we imply it’s optional or light-hearted. Anything ‘hard’ refers to something only a small percentage of people can master if they have enough time.

Both of these terms were created in the old world of work, and we’re on the precipice of a new one filled with more unknowns than ever. To give ourselves the best chance of succeeding, we’ll need all the skills we’ve got – soft, hard and complex – to navigate our way through it.

Tim Duggan is author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com