Soft (human) skills are intrinsically different than hard (technical) skills. They impact our professional lives in fundamentally different ways. More precisely, technical skills give us the tools needed to perform a number of tasks while human skills give us the tools to be able to accomplish those tasks in the physical world, interacting with an environment that we have no control over. To make this difference clear let’s compare, as an example, JavaScript to Critical Thinking.
To learn JavaScript it’s enough to attend a good online course, and/or read a good book, and put it into practice. To stay sharp with JavaScript I have to keep learning and practicing because in just 2.5 years from now, research tells us, I will know half of what I currently know about JavaScript. Moreover, for as much as JavaScript is a versatile language, it is of very little use in improving relationships with colleagues, teachers, or partners and it’s equally useless for cooking a meal or building a stone wall.
To learn Critical Thinking, instead, I can’t just listen to a class or read a book. For as good as they may be, I need to practice if I have to learn how to apply Critical Thinking to the various situations life presents to me. Once I've learned Critical Thinking I will not forget it and I’ll be able to use it in every situation, both professional and personal. There is no upper limit to learning Critical Thinking because we never stop learning skills like this: the more I’m exposed to situations that require Critical Thinking the more experience on the subject I will acquire. Critical Thinking is very useful in dealing with colleagues, teachers, and partners and it has to be used to successfully prepare a meal or build a wall.
When we look at the nature of human skills, it clearly makes no sense to talk about measuring them in an absolute way, like “I have 3 meters of Leadership while you have 7 meters of it”. Nevertheless human skills can be measured in relation to another person, group, or job role.
Human skills requires to be measured in a dynamic way. We can not measure these skills unless they are in action. This requires to “immerse” people in situations where they are asked to rely upon their human skills while measuring the response of all participants.
Unlike hard skills, it is not possible to say when a person knows everything about leadership because it depends solely on how well he or she will cope with the next experience, of which nothing can be predicted. If he or she passes it, then he or she had sufficient experience; if he or she does not pass it, the failed event will provide experience to improve next time, i.e., learning never ends.
To improve soft skills, therefore, I need to practice by “immersing” myself in a “reality simulator” such as video games. Video games are, among many things, creative transpositions of social dynamics that we face every day. They are for all intents and purposes a fun and creative gymnasium of life. |
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