What are soft skills?

A VERY BROAD DEFINITION

You may be wondering what is the purpose of Soft Kids, our application for which we launched a crowdfunding campaign on Ulule on May 21?

Our subject is "soft skills". Often difficult to define, soft skills are those personal and relational competencies that are neither knowledge nor know-how. A combination of interpersonal skills, character or personality traits that enable us to navigate our environment and society.

SOFT SKILLS IN THEORY

English psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, one of the pioneers of "soft skills", declared that social intelligence, rather than qualitative intelligence, defines humans. Co-authors Jérôme Hoarau and Julien Bouret also explain that "Everyone has all the seeds in potential, but they have been more or less watered depending on the social, family, economic context",(Le réflexe soft skills, les compétences des leaders de demain, Ed. Dunod, 2014). "Essential, behavioral skills are assimilated throughout life in a slow process that can be compared to sports training," they add in an interview with Forbes magazine.

Soft skills, also known as behavioral competencies, are a group of abilities that can be used in all aspects of life, enabling us to adapt to different situations. They help us to behave positively, so that we can deal effectively with the challenges of life and everyday life. These soft skills make people flexible in an ever-changing world.

SOFT SKILLS IN PRACTICE

Interest in these general skills has grown over the years. As research has progressed, the relevance of this concept has become clear. Today, in the 21st century, "soft skills" are a major differentiator, a sine qua non for employability. and success in life, but also for better living together.

The Nobel Prize James Heckman states that "soft skills predict success in life, and programs that improve soft skills have an important place in an effective public policy portfolio". At Soft Kids, we think so too.

Today, employers are paying increasing attention to these "soft skills" in addition to purely professional qualifications. They make people who have developed them extremely valuable and sought-after by companies. Soft skills" are becoming desirable qualities over and above knowledge requirements: they include, for example, common sense, the ability to collaborate with others and problem-solving skills.

SOFT SKILLS, THE MUST HAVE SKILLS OF THE 21st CENTURY

TheOECD report " The Future of Education and Skills 2030" published in 2019 highlighted the growing importance of soft skills in education due to trends such as globalization and rapid advances in technology and artificial intelligence, which require future workers to constantly adapt. The report states that "to remain competitive, workers will need to continually acquire new skills, which requires flexibility, a positive attitude towards lifelong learning and curiosity."

To maximize the long-term benefits of soft skills, they should be developed with young children, particularly between the ages of 1 and 9. Nobel laureates Heckman and Kautz (2012) demonstrated this in their analysis of the Perry Preschool Soft Skills program, in which they discovered how personality traits can be modified to produce beneficial lifelong outcomes.

That's our ambition at Soft Kids: to make young children aware of these behavioral skills in a playful way, so that they can be happy and prepared to live in a world that doesn't yet exist!

Justine Touchard

Soft Kids community manager.

Sources :

https://www.forbes.fr/management/les-15-soft-skills-a-maitriser-en-entreprise/?cn-reloaded=1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_skills

https://www.forbes.fr/management/soft-skills-lhumain-nest-pas-un-tableau-excel/?cn-reloaded=1