The skills gap hiding in plain sight: it's time to get intentional about “soft” skills
Higher education is under fire. Students, employers, and policymakers are all asking the same uncomfortable question: are we actually preparing people for the world? The answer, more often than not, is: not as well as we think.
The criticism isn’t really about course content or academic rigor. It’s about something harder to measure and, for that reason, easier to overlook — soft skills.
So what are soft skills, exactly?
Soft skills are the interpersonal, cognitive, and professional competencies that shape how people work — not just what they can do, but how they do it. They include things like:
Communication — written, verbal, and the ability to listen actively and adapt your message to your audience
Critical thinking — analyzing information, questioning assumptions, and making reasoned decisions
Collaboration — working effectively across differences, managing conflict, and contributing to a shared goal
Adaptability — responding to change, tolerating ambiguity, and learning on the fly
Civic engagement — the capacity to participate thoughtfully in community and democratic life
The term “soft” is unfortunately misleading. These skills are anything but soft in practice. They are the skills that get people hired, get them promoted, and — critically — make them effective contributors to both their workplaces and their communities.
A brief history
Soft skills are not a new idea. The ancient trivium — grammar, rhetoric, and logic — was essentially an early framework for communication and reasoning. Liberal arts education, at its best, has always aimed to produce graduates who can think, speak, and engage as citizens. But somewhere along the way, that vision got crowded out.
The twentieth century brought enormous pressure on universities to produce credentialed specialists. Funding followed job-placement metrics. Curricula narrowed. General education requirements — often the only place soft skills were even nominally addressed — became boxes to check rather than genuine developmental experiences.
By the time employers began sounding the alarm in the 2000s and 2010s, the structural patterns were already entrenched. Survey after survey showed hiring managers struggling to find graduates who could communicate clearly, work in teams, or handle the ambiguity of real workplace problems. Yet the response within higher education was often to acknowledge the gap rhetorically while leaving the curriculum essentially unchanged.
The debate heating up now
Today, the pressure is sharper. Workforce development concerns have been joined by a broader anxiety about the purpose of education itself. Can graduates navigate an information environment saturated with misinformation? Can they engage productively with people who hold different values? Are they equipped not just to hold jobs, but to be neighbors, voters, and community members?
These are not fringe questions. They are driving serious policy conversations, accreditation reviews, and institutional strategic planning across the country. And they are landing squarely in the lap of faculty — often without much guidance about what to do next.
What faculty can do
Here’s the good news: you don’t have to rebuild your course from scratch. Soft skill development doesn’t require a separate class or a wholesale redesign. It requires intention.
Start with a simple question: what soft skills are genuinely necessary in the field or context your course addresses? A nursing course, an engineering capstone, and a sociology seminar will have different answers. Once you’ve identified two or three, ask yourself: where in this course do students already encounter situations that demand these skills — and are they being asked to practice and reflect on them explicitly?
A few practical approaches that work across disciplines:
Add a learning outcome that names the soft skill alongside the content objective. “Students will synthesize competing theoretical frameworks and communicate their reasoning clearly to a non-expert audience.”
Design at least one assignment that requires collaboration, peer feedback, or real-world stakeholder communication.
Build in structured reflection — brief written responses that ask students to name what they practiced, what was hard, and what they’d do differently.
Assess the soft skill directly, not just the content output. If communication matters, grade the communication.
A call to faculty
Higher education’s critics are not entirely wrong. We have, for too long, assumed that soft skills develop by osmosis — that the act of going to college somehow produces capable communicators and engaged citizens without anyone having to teach those things explicitly. The evidence suggests otherwise.
The good news is that we don’t need to wait for sweeping institutional change to start doing better. Every faculty member, in every discipline, has the power to look at their course and ask: what are the human skills my students need, and am I actually teaching them?
That question — taken seriously — is where the change begins.
Additional Question: Do you think the term “soft” is the most appropriate word to describe these skills? How do you feel about “durable skills?” What term other might you suggest?