campusreview.com.au
We’re not soft enough. That is, when it comes to our skills.
That’s the conclusion of a report by Deloitte Access Economics,
commissioned by DeakinCo, a workforce professional
development provider.
The report, Soft Skills for Business Success, found that the
demand for soft skills in the workforce surpasses supply by nearly
45 per cent.
If unaddressed, this issue will become increasingly critical.
Deloitte predicted that, by 2030, 63 per cent of Australian jobs will
be soft skill heavy.
Although Australians possess high levels of soft skills like
communication, team work, problem-solving, professional ethics
and global citizenship compared to those in other countries, less
than 1 per cent of us list such skills on our LinkedIn profiles.
DeakinCo chief executive Simon Hann stated that the reason for
this is that people are loath to claim unverifiable skills.
Hann’s report also indicated employers have difficulty filling entry-
level places due to a soft skills shortage, despite the clear majority of
graduates possessing these skills.
Campus Review sits down with Hann to discuss this apparent
paradox, and to delve into the report’s other discoveries.
CR: Can you start by elaborating on the threat of artificial
intelligence taking peoples’ jobs in profess ions that are hard
skill heavy?
SH: The prevailing thinking is that artificial intelligence – to the extent
that it contributes to automation, along with a whole range of things,
including other digital technologies – will see 40 per cent of jobs in
their current form disappear within the next 10 years.
All that sounds a bit doomsday, but at a higher level, the
anticipation is that they would be replaced by other jobs.
The findings that came out of the Soft Skills for Business Success
report is that as automation happens, I suppose the component
of soft skill-intensive jobs will grow to around two-thirds of jobs
by 2030. We’re already seeing that those soft skill-intensive roles,
as opposed to more technical skill-intensive roles, are growing at
about 2.5 times faster.
With the increase in people obtaining university qualifications, are soft
skills becoming a differentiating factor between job applicants?
Absolutely. [According to our report] a quarter of employers can’t
find people for entry-level jobs that have the level of soft skills
they would like. So I think there’s a competitive advantage or
differentiator. Universities are very much looking at how those
soft skills are embedded as learning outcomes in the programs
they deliver.
The report suggests university graduates have higher levels of soft
skills, yet as you mention, employers are finding it difficult to employ
them in entry-level positions. Can you explain why?
Some of those entry-level positions where they’re struggling, they’re
recruiting people without qualifications, and so they might be people
who are going straight into the workforce without going through
a university. So that’s the gap in that data piece. I think people
expect that a lot of those, particularly work-ready soft skills, can only
come through on-the-job experience – getting into a workplace
and understanding the dynamics and the street smarts of how
organisations are. While a lot of these soft skills can be prepared and
developed at university, it’s only once you get into the application of
WORKFORCE
those in the workplace that you start to see those evolve.
The report also noted that a shift away from the hierarchical model
of workplaces also increases the demand for soft skills. Can you
explain why?
I think what we’re seeing is that, increasingly, technology is enabling
people to work in teams that are not constrained by geography. So
if you’ve got a team working on a project, you don’t need those 10
people sitting in the same room together. They can be in different
time zones, they can be in different geographies.
So it’s this concept of bringing together teams, and particularly where
you’ve got people that aren’t necessarily geographically or time zone
connected, the soft skills around communication, teamwork, problem
solving become a higher-level requirement for effective teamwork.
This concept of putting together teams to work on projects or work on
problems breaks down that hierarchy.
What’s happening in educational institutions regarding the teaching of
soft skills?
I can best speak to the Deakin experience. Of the Deakin graduate
learning outcomes, only one of those is actually the technical
knowledge of the subject. The others are all very much aligned with soft
skills, so things like communication, problem solving, critical thinking
and digital literacy. Those learning outcomes need to be mapped and
embedded in programs. I think the other thing too is that there’s a lot
more work-integrated learning in the sense of the placements as part of
university courses. People working in and getting credit for being placed
into businesses and working on projects.
The report found that people tend to severely under-report their
soft skills. Why would this be the case?
That was a key one for me because there was that 45 per cent
gap between the demand for soft skills coming out of job ads and
where the supply was coming from candidates. I think it’s because
we don’t have an easy way to measure or confirm that we have a
soft skill. I think people then have a reluctance to claim something
that they can’t necessarily provide hard evidence for. For us, that’s
where the micro-credentialling piece will start to provide a solution.
So, through what we are doing at DeakinCo, we can independently
measure and issue a credential against soft skills. So people then
have the evidence and the confidence to be able to claim those
soft skills.
Are there any other methods that people can use to strengthen their
soft skills or credential them further?
Like we’ve seen with endorsements on LinkedIn, the challenge has
been having proof that someone knows you well enough to claim that
you have that skill or to endorse that skill.
But I think we’ll start to see stronger and more rigorous ways of
[proving] peer-endorsed capabilities or skills.
It is interesting that … only 1 per cent of people claim that they
have soft skills on their LinkedIn profile, and that’s consistent with
the global data. But if you do list a soft skill on your LinkedIn profile,
you’re nine times more likely to have someone endorse you for
that skill.
So I think we need a shift in mindset around soft skills as
something we think we have but don’t claim because we don’t have
the confidence to measure them, or to be more front and centre in
our conversations around what our capabilities are. ■
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