Whose job is it to provide future workers with the interpersonal skills necessary to navigate the working world (and the world in general, really)? Is it their parents and community? K-12 education? College? Employers themselves? Opinions on that vary but what everyone seems to agree on is that these skills are crucial for success.
According to a Deloitte survey released last week, half of full-time workers at companies with a minimum annual revenue of $100 million surveyed are “very or extremely worried that the future generation of workers may enter the workforce without sufficient interpersonal and business skills.” Yeah, that’s already happening. See also: Big 4 Firms Are Noticing a Sudden Skills Gap in New Hires and ‘Lockdown-Damaged’ New Hires Struggle to Socialize at KPMG UK. All this time we thought the art of water cooler chitchat was a useless skill but instead it’s a dying one.
Many of those surveyed feel their employers focus too heavily on technical training and not nearly enough — or even at all — on human skills.
Said Deloitte:
In a workforce increasingly leveraging both humans and machines, human capabilities play an essential role in career development, according to nearly 9 in 10 respondents across generations. Concurrently, respondents want their employers to prioritize a myriad of human skills, but teamwork and collaboration ranked at the top (65%), followed by communication (61%) and leadership (56%) more than technical skills like AI integration and data analysis (54%).
Employers: “Best I can do is a mandatory online learning session about ChatGPT prompting.”
Above all, respondents believe these human competencies have staying power. Nearly all surveyed (95%) agree human skills are “timeless” and always important. Yet, 70% of respondents report having worked at a company that pushed employees to learn a new technology-based skillset, only for that technology to fall out of use.
Some more key findings:
- 87% of workers see human skills like adaptability, leadership, and communications as integral to their career advancement.
- Only 52% think their company values employees with human skills more than those with technical skills.
- 94% of respondents are concerned that future generations will enter the workforce without the necessary human skills.
- Workers want their employers to prioritize teamwork and collaboration (65%), communication (61%), and leadership skills (56%) more than technical skills like AI integration and data analysis (54%).
And finally, a pretty picture putting it all together. Deloitte made this a PDF for some reason, sorry.
Most Workers See Need for Greater Balance Between Tech and Human Skills: Deloitte Survey [Deloitte]
