“[Generation Z students have] been ‘digitalized’ at a very early age and taught to believe that the best way to solve a problem is go to a machine and find your solution, instead of to another person.” – Jim Link, CHRO of Randstad North America[1]
Which skills do employers report are the hardest to find among recent college grads? Critical-thinking, communication, listening, and interpersonal skills—the so-called “soft skills.”1
Why? Because these days, instead of joining campus clubs or volunteering alongside their peers, many college students opt for online groups, apps, and social networks, suggests Eric Frazer, a teacher at the Yale School of Medicine.1
With half of Americans who were employed prior to the pandemic working from home now, and a growing number of companies like Facebook and Twitter adopting permanent remote work policies, could the soft skills gap grow wider as more people spend their personal and professional lives online?[2]
Let’s look at the data for clues.
What Is the Soft Skills Gap?
The soft skills gap refers to the increasing number of surveys revealing employers are struggling to find applicants with communication, listening, critical-thinking, and interpersonal skills.1
Experts at the World Economic Forum predict these uniquely human skills will be crucial to workers’ ability to add value where machines fall short in the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is set to automate 47% of U.S. jobs over the next 20 years.[3]
Soft Skills Gap Statistics
- 64% of employers report finding qualified applications with critical-thinking skills is somewhat or very difficult.
- 55% of employers struggle to find candidates with listening skills.
- 54% of company recruiters describe the process of finding job seekers with communication skills as challenging.
- 55% of hiring managers have a hard time finding applicants with interpersonal skills.1
What’s to blame for the soft skills gap? Many experts point to colleges’ overemphasis on teaching technical skills to the detriment of liberal arts curriculum in recent years.1 Others suggest that spending more and more time online is stunting the development of soft skills in younger generations.1
Could Working from Home Make the Soft Skills Gap Worse?
It’s too early to know whether or not working from home could exacerbate the soft skills gap. Research on the effects of hyperconnectivity on the development and retention of soft skills, however, does exist.[4]
What Is Hyperconnectivity?
Hyperconnectivity is the increasing digital interconnection of people and things.[5]
You’ve likely seen the world become hyperconnected in the last thirty years thanks to the advent of the Internet.4 It’s revolutionized nearly every facet of our lives: how we find information, communicate, socialize, date, and now—faced with a global pandemic—how we work. Working from home is the new normal.2
What’s the Relationship Between Hyperconnectivity and Soft Skills?
Hyperconnectivity can affect soft skills because studies show the excessive use of digital media can change patterns of social interaction; shape behavioral and cognitive development; and influence mental and physical health.5
One study, “The ‘Online Brain’: How the Internet May Be Changing Our Cognition,” revealed that hyperconnectivity could impact three areas of cognition specifically: attention, memory, and social interaction.4
Attention
As you’ve likely noticed, the online experience can be highly distracting, forcing you to switch your attention to incoming messages and notifications often. As your brain habituates to this frequent multitasking, your ability to sustain your focus on one thing at a time could diminish.
The result? A shortened attention span.4
If you’ve ever had to solve a difficult problem, then you well know how important being able to focus for prolonged periods of time is to critical thinking.
Memory
Outsourcing information is nothing new. We’ve been doing it for millennia.4 You may have outsourced information the last time you asked your spouse how to use the power drill.
Or, you may have just “Googled” the answer. That’s what many people do these days, and the research shows this overreliance on the Internet for information could be diminishing our ability to remember things after we’ve learned them. We do, however, remember where to find the information: online.4
How important is memory to critical thinking?
“[Critical] thinking requires a lot of memorized knowledge and intuitive, automatic judgements to be performed quickly and accurately,” write researchers at Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.[6]
Social Interaction
Social media has become controversial in recent years for its role in shaping global affairs: the London Riots, the Arab Spring, Brexit, and, more recently, the 2016 U.S. elections.4
But is social media interfering with our ability to interact with one another? Not much, indicates the study. That’s because the same time constraints on socializing that limit us in the real world set us back online.4
It makes sense. If you have only enough time to engagingly interact with a handful of people in real life, then taking those connections online won’t magically give you more hours in the day.4
Social media is simply ‘a new playing field for the same game,’ point out the researchers: we suffer the pain of rejection and upward social comparison (or “Keeping Up with the Joneses”) in both worlds.
The main difference? We can’t count and compare the number of “friends,” “followers,” and “likes” we get offline.4 And this could potentially contribute to “reduced sleep and in-person social interaction and increased sedentary behavior and perceived loneliness.”4
Aside from the negative implications of social media for mental and physical health, it’s easy to see how less in-person social interaction could hinder the development of soft skills or cause them to atrophy. Because candid, face-to-face conversations require strong listening skills, self-control, and even the subtle ability to mirror another’s facial expression that we learn in infancy.
It’s important to note, too, that interacting on social media can be quite different than working from home. Employees may still be having face-to-face conversations with co-workers and employers via Zoom throughout the day.
How Can We Close the Soft Skills Gap?
More time and research are needed to draw strong conclusions on the role of hyperconnectivity, specifically in the context of working from home, in the soft skills gap.
In the meantime, it may be helpful for employers to focus on the solution instead of the origins of the problem: soft skills training.
A recent MIT study suggests that soft skills can be taught. Researchers found that a “12-month workforce training program focused on improving communication, problem-solving and decision-making, time and stress management…significantly impacted productivity.”
Most impressive? The 250% return on investment from the training just eight months after its completion, mostly attributable to the increase in productivity.3
Soft skills, or employability, training could hold the key to preparing your workers for the paradigm shift automation is bringing. See if it’s right for your company today. Watch the Demo now.
Written by Auroriele Hans
Sources
[1] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/employee-relations/pages/employers-say-students-arent-learning-soft-skills-in-college.aspx
[2] https://hbr.org/2020/07/why-wfh-isnt-necessarily-good-for-women
[3] https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/technology-and-the-future-of-work/closing-the-employability-skills-gap.html
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6502424/
[5] https://reports.weforum.org/human-implications-of-digital-media-2016/section-3-impact-of-digital-media-on-individuals-organizations-and-society/
[6] https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/how-memory-works