Soft skill

Soft skills are a combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, character traits, attitudes, career attributes,social intelligence and emotional intelligence quotients among others that enable people to navigate their environment, work well with others, perform well, and achieve their goals with complementing hard skills. The Collins English Dictionary defines the term "soft skills" as "desirable qualities for certain forms of employment that do not depend on acquired knowledge: they include common sense, the ability to deal with people, and a positive flexible attitude."

Since 1959, the U.S. Army has been investing a considerable amount of resources into technology-based development of training procedures. In 1968 the U.S. Army officially introduced a training doctrine known as "Systems Engineering of Training" covered in the document CON Reg 350-100-1.

PG Whitmore cited the CON Reg 350-100-1 definition: "job related skills involving actions affecting primarily people and paper, e.g., inspecting troops, supervising office personnel, conducting studies, preparing maintenance reports, preparing efficiency reports, designing bridge structures."

At the 1972 CONARC Soft Skills Conference Dr. Whitmore presented a report aimed at figuring out how the term "soft skills" (in the areas of command, supervision, counseling and leadership) is understood in various CONARC schools. After designing and processing a questionnaire, the following tentative definition was formulated: "Soft skills are important job-related skills that involve little or no interaction with machines and whose application on the job is quite generalized."

They further criticized state of the concept then as vague with a remark "in other words, those job functions about which we know a good deal are hard skills and those about which we know very little are soft skills." Another immediate study by them also concluded in a negative tone.

Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey famously stated that it is social intelligence that defines humans rather than quantitative intelligence. Many industries today give prominence to soft skills of their employees. It is through a 1972 US Army training manual identified formal usage of the term "soft skills" began.

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