Soft skills is a serious misnomer
Walk into any HR department, scroll through any LinkedIn post about professional development, or sit through any career coaching session, and you’ll hear the same refrain: soft skills matter. You can even scroll through our pieces and website, you’ll see it too. Actually, what you’ll see is that we think soft skills like communication, empathy and adaptability are anything but soft.
In fact, the more we write it, the more the term “soft” bothers me. We’re consistently told that these skills are important, undervalued, and increasingly what separates good employees from great ones.
Yet, soft has an entirely different connotation. The term denotes a nice to have and not an essential set of skills that matter as much as ‘practical’, hard skills.
While reading Adam Grant’s book, Hidden Potential, he talks about how the term soft skills came into existence and its origin surprised me.
The term “soft skills” wasn’t invented by a career coach, a management consultant, or a business school professor. It was coined by the United States Army to distinguish between skills like gun handling, something that never came up in my masters coursework in Industrial Organizational Psychology.
Machines, Men, and the Problem of Training
In the late 1950s and through the 1960s, the U.S. Army was investing heavily in what we might now call evidence-based training as a response to learnings from World War II and the looming threat of the Cold War. The Army wanted to move away from intuition and tradition and toward something more systematic — a rigorous, engineerable approach to turning civilians into effective soldiers.
In 1968, the U.S. Continental Army Command (CONARC) formally introduced a training doctrine called “Systems Engineering of Training.” The idea was straightforward: break down every job in the Army into its component skills, figure out how to teach those skills efficiently, and measure how well soldiers had learned them.
It worked beautifully for skills involving machines. Teaching someone to operate a tank, fly a helicopter, or field-strip a rifle fit neatly into a systems engineering framework. These were concrete, measurable, observable actions. You either hit the target or you didn’t. The gun either jammed or it fired. Every skill and action had hard outcomes and hard feedback.
But Army leaders kept noticing something that didn’t fit the model. Units with technically identical training produced wildly different outcomes in the field. The difference wasn’t usually marksmanship or mechanical aptitude. It was leadership, cohesion, how soldiers communicated under stress, how they motivated one another and how a sergeant could read a room and make decisions that no training manual explicitly covered.
These were critically important capabilities — and the Army had no framework for teaching, measuring, or even talking about them.
Naming the Unnamed
The solution was, characteristically and bureaucratically, to hold a conference. In December 1972, CONARC convened a two-day “Soft Skills Training Conference” in the U.S. Army Air Defense School in Fort Bliss, Texas. Researchers, trainers, and military officials gathered to grapple with a fundamental question: how do you systematize the training of skills that resist systematization?
Dr. Paul Whitmore, a key figure at the conference, offered what became the foundational definition: soft skills are “important job-related skills that involve little or no interaction with machines and whose application on the job is quite generalized.”
That’s it, that was the original meaning. No mention of “interpersonal skills” or “emotional intelligence” or “the stuff that’s hard to quantify and put on a résumé.” It was simply skills that don’t involve operating machinery.
The counterpart — hard skills — referred to skills that did involve machines. Physical objects you could touch: a gun, a radio, a vehicle. The “hard” and “soft” distinction was almost purely material, not a judgment about difficulty or importance.
There was, according to accounts of the proceedings, a heated discussion at the conference about whether things like map-reading were hard or soft skills. Maps, at the time, after all, were made of paper, not machines. The debate apparently went unresolved. But this example underscores just how important that hard/machine vs soft/non-machine delineation was.
A Phrase That Outlived Its Definition
What’s even more fascinating about this is that even as the Army coined the term, they were sceptical of it. The 1972 conference formally recommended that “use of the terms ‘soft skill’ and ‘hard skill’ be deemphasized or discontinued,” noting that the categories were ambiguous and potentially misleading. The Army listened, the rest of the world didn’t.
Over the following decades, “soft skills” migrated out of military training manuals and into business schools, corporate HR departments, and self-help books. Along the way, its meaning shifted substantially. What had been a neutral technical distinction became a loaded value judgment.
“Soft” became increasingly fuzz – things that are hard to measure, hard to teach, and maybe not entirely serious and potentially dismissive. Meanwhile, “hard skills” became synonymous with technical expertise: coding, accounting, engineering. The kind of credentials you can list on a résumé with a number attached.
The irony is profound. The Army hadn’t been dismissive of soft skills at all. They’d been trying to take them more seriously and find ways to rigorously develop and assess capabilities they recognised as crucial to military effectiveness. The whole point of the conference was to treat leadership and communication with the same systematic attention as rifle maintenance. The word “soft” was meant to be descriptive, not diminutive.
The Rebrand That Hasn’t Stuck
For decades now, critics have argued that the term “soft skills” does these capabilities a disservice. We’re certainly not the first ones to decry the use of soft as incorrect. The word “soft” implies the opposite of what we actually mean — that these skills are somehow easier, less rigorous, or less important than technical ones.
Proposed alternatives have proliferated: people skills, human skills, power skills, core skills, essential skills, transferable skills, interpersonal skills, and emotional intelligence. And, I’ll say it, Capacities of a Thriving Workplace (the framework we created).
Seth Godin, the marketing writer, has argued passionately that we should retire the term entirely, noting that calling empathy and communication “soft” is precisely why organisations chronically underinvest in developing them.
We couldn’t agree more with him. Language shapes perception and perception has real consequences — in hiring, in training budgets, in how we design schools and measure career success.
What the Origin Actually Tells Us
There’s something clarifying about knowing where this phrase came from. The U.S. Army — not an institution typically associated with emotional sensitivity — recognised over fifty years ago that the skills most resistant to a checklist are often the skills most responsible for success or failure.
They saw it on the battlefield: technically proficient units that fell apart, and less-equipped units that performed brilliantly, and the difference came down to how people communicated, trusted each other, and followed — or became — effective leaders.
What they named “soft” skills, we might more honestly call human skills or capacities. The things machines cannot do, that algorithms struggle to replicate, and that no amount of technical training alone can substitute for.
The Army figured this out by 1972. Most of us are still catching up.
The full proceedings of the 1972 CONARC Soft Skills Training Conference are available as a scanned document — a 340-page, five-volume record of the moment someone first put a name to something that had always been there.