Stop Calling Them Soft Skills

As I listened to the woman on the other end of the phone, I remember having a sinking feeling. She uttered words I’d heard before but all of a sudden, they affected me in a different way. She said, “Yeah, we have great training here. We don’t really have a need for any soft skills vendors.”

I’d heard the term ‘soft skills’ before but today it took on a different meaning. My mind exploded with its own conversation and questions.

“What does she mean…soft?”

“Doesn’t she know how critical this is for her company?”

“Doesn’t she know how much time she is wasting with bad presentations and poor communication?”

“What if they lost a lot of money and had to let a lot of people go due to a miscommunication? I’ll bet it wouldn’t be so soft then, huh?”

These questions circled because although I’d heard the term before, I’d never really stopped to ask WHY they were called soft skills. Technically, soft skills refer to traits and skills which allow you to interact with others while hard skills are concrete knowledge traits which allow you to perform a job or task. My objection came because of how the term soft is typically perceived. When you hear ‘soft’, you think fuzzy, cuddly, cushy. When the term soft is applied to people, you think cupcake, push-over, non-confrontational…