Hard, soft skills that pay the bills

An increasingly common theme in today’s increasingly competitive job market is “the skills gap,” the stark, blunt way of expressing the growing phenomenon of insufficient skills on the part of job seekers in relation to what employers are saying they need.

I wrote a story that appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal two months ago, I addressed the skills gap in a general way, offering the following as a backdrop.

Embedded in our national unemployment rate is a startling reality: There are 12 million people unemployed, yet there are 3.6 million unfilled jobs in America. (This is called the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) So here are the questions. If that many people are looking for work, how can there be that many unfilled jobs? Wouldn’t you think those jobs would be gobbled up in a day? If employers need 3.6 million workers, and those workers are all looking to get hired, what gives?

The rest of the February story dealt with causes — and possible cures — for this problem. Today, though, we’ll take a look at what those skills are: what skills you as a job seeker might not have that, if you did, would put you in a more competitive position for one of those jobs.

It should be noted, before going any further, that this number of 3.6 million has climbed in the past two months. It stands at 3.7 million, and that’s only a preliminary number from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Based on the trend over the past five years, it’s safe to say that it could be higher than 3.7 million once the numbers are finalized. Also of note, 3.7 million is at or very near the highest level since July 2008 — and a full 69 percent higher than the lowest level of 2.1 million, which was at the very depths of the recession in mid-2009.

This is both good news and bad news. To understand why it’s both, let’s look at it from two different angles. First, the gap exists because employers need skills they either didn’t need before or didn’t need as much.

That’s the good news — uh, kind of. In other words, the required skills levels are on the rise, indicating advancement in industries across the board. Simply, we need higher-skilled workers and/or workers with different skills.

The other side of the coin, though, is that we’re not producing them — for many reasons (which is what I discussed two months ago). Therefore, many of the jobs being created now are out of the reach of many job seekers.

That, in a nutshell, is why there are 3.7 million unfilled jobs (and counting).

Nationwide, jobs were created in the first two months of this year at a rate of more than 8,600 per work day (based on a five-day week), heading to an even brisker rate as hiring accelerates in 2013. Again, these are preliminary numbers, likely to be higher.

But the open jobs remain open — to a startling extent.

According to a new poll by the Society for Human Resource Management, two-thirds of organizations that are hiring full-time workers are having a difficult time recruiting for specific job openings, a marked increase from 2011. This is part of the society’s broad-based effort to measure the effect of the U.S. and global recession that began in 2007.

Hard skills vs. soft skills?

The skills we’re talking about here — the skills employers say they can’t find — fall into two major categories, the only two categories of skills there are: hard skills and soft skills, typified in these two excerpts from its recent report.

1. “Difficulty in filling specific jobs varies by industry. But overall, the most difficult positions to fill are highly skilled positions such as scientists, engineers, high-skilled technical (technicians and programmers) and high-skilled medical (nurses, doctors, specialists).”

2. “HR professionals continue to report gaps in basic knowledge and skills in job applicants. Critical thinking/problem solving remains the top skill gap with 53 percent of respondents saying that job applicants typically lack that skill. It is followed by professionalism/work ethic (46 percent), written communication (41 percent) and leadership (38 percent). The most common gaps in basic knowledge are writing in English (reported by 55 percent of respondents), mathematics (38 percent) and reading comprehension (31 percent).”

The difference between hard skills and soft skills is clearly delineated by these two parts of the report. The first describes what we call hard skills: technical expertise you need to do a specific job well. In the examples above, we see scientists, engineers, technicians and health care workers, but we can easily see how this expands to occupations such as accounting, Web design, plumbing, machine operators, soil testing, statistics and other mathematics, robotics (especially in manufacturing) and a host of others.

The second touches upon soft skills: simply, the skills you need to do any job well — or all jobs well, for that matter — and to fit in well at work. In fact, an informal poll conducted by my firm, Amdur Coaching and Advisory Group LLC, showed a greater concern for soft skills than that reflected by the society’s survey. In our poll, 90 percent of corporate executives and recruiters stated that their greatest skills gap came in communications skills and teamwork. What they were saying, in essence, was that, while it is indeed difficult to find enough good candidates with well-developed hard skills, what really keeps them up at night is the inability to find workers who can communicate: with each other, with customers, with vendors, with the public, with the media and so forth.

Soft skills transcend what you do to how you do it: communication (the six communications skills we discuss in my graduate communication course are writing, speaking, public speaking, nonverbal, cross-cultural and listening), problem solving, decision making, team building, leadership, strategic planning, ethics and value setting, and creative thinking.

What’s going on here?

Why is all of this such a big deal, when you heard hardly a word about this a couple of decades ago? Well, it’s startlingly simple when you boil it down.

The hard skills part of the equation is easy to figure out. Why have they become so crucial and so hard to find? The answer is technology, which advances faster than our ability to keep up with it in job training.

The society’s report leaves no room for doubt, saying “Thirty percent of organizations said they made major changes in the use of technology that impacted the work of employees in the last year, and 10 percent said they planned to in the next 12 months. Of those respondents, 72 percent said these technological changes would require new skills of employees, although not the addition of new staff.”

But, if you think about it just one step further, of course this will require new staff. Change creates, more than anything else, more change, and that means staff turnover or business expansion or entry into new markets or any one of dozens of other conditions, all of which could and will drive the need for new staff sooner or later.

So what’s the deal?

The deal is simple. Our task is to identify the skills we’re talking about, the skills that will pay the bills. We can determine hard skills by looking at hard data. We’ll determine the soft skills by figuring things out more instinctively.

Hard skills

In the hard skills category, one sensible approach is to see where job expansion will take place. Clearly, as it has been for more than two decades, health care is the first place to look. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the three fastest growing occupations in the 2010- 20 decade (by percentage growth) are in health care: personal care aides at 70.5 percent, home health aides at 69.4 percent and biomedical engineers at 61.7 (although there will be few of these in raw numbers).

The first two, however, represent not only a large rate of growth, they also represent more than 1.3 million new jobs in the decade. Further in health care, there will be 712,000 more registered nurses in 2020 than there were in 2010, many of them dealing with an aging population and all the things associated with older patients: acute, chronic and long-term care.

These are not the only rapidly changing health care occupations. If you think for just a moment about how fast technology is changing health care delivery, you realize that simply keeping up with the changes in imaging is a path to employment. It used to be all about X-rays; that’s evolved to CAT, PET, MRI, fMri, 64-slice and so on. Soon it will have to do with nanotechnology — and so on, ad infinitum. Further, complementary and alternative modalities offer broad options and sweeping changes. Anyone staying ahead of this curve is likely to have few or no long-term employment searches.

In all, 16 of the 30 fastest-growing occupations (by percentage) are in health care and so are nine of the top 30 occupations in raw numbers. Learn the skills needed for these jobs, and you’re in the game.

Beyond health care, which has three of the four largest job growth occupations (in raw numbers), No. 5 — with 490 more jobs — is the category of office clerks. The hard skills needed here are easy to identify and (relatively) easy to acquire. Stay up-to-date on these hard skills, and you stay in good position for continued employment, given the projected growth.

This column doesn’t allow enough room to list all the specific fast-growth job opportunities we will see this year, so here’s how you’ll find them. Go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, www.bls.gov and, under the publications tab, find the Occupational Outlook Handbook, a huge but easy-to-navigate database which will tell you what you need to know about more than 800 occupations, nature of the work, education and skills needed, and job outlook (growth). Take it from there; it’s your hard skills map.

Soft skills

On the soft skills side, the second largest job growth occupation is retail sales, with 707,000 jobs being created this decade. Seventh on the list is customer service representatives, and among the top 30 are receptionists, sales representatives (both wholesale and retail), and waiters and waitresses.

Among other fast-growth occupations (by percentage) is that of meeting and event planners. All of these jobs need a solid set of soft skills above and beyond any specific job-related skills: the ability to communicate, persuade, solve problems and build collaboration and agreement.

Virtually all jobs, no matter how technical, need excellent soft skills, but it doesn’t take any hard data to figure that out. When employers are saying they need people who can write well, understand what they read, think independently, solve problems, do basic math (more advanced math is a bonus), build (or work well on) teams and manage their time so that simple things like showing up for work on time is not an issue (no kidding), you can be sure they’re not limiting this to specific jobs. This holds true everywhere in every occupation at every level.

hard skills versus soft skills

No, it’s not a matter of hard skills versus soft skills; it’s really — and quite evidently — a matter of hard skills and soft skills. The skills that pay the bills, as it turns out, are both hard and soft.