Why Soft Skills are Key to Modern Workforce Success
An interview with Nick Shaw, Co-Founder and CCO at Spotted Zebra
Q: Can you tell us about Spotted Zebra? What does your company do, and who are your typical customers?
Spotted Zebra is an award-winning skills intelligence platform provider. The company was founded 4+ years ago by myself, a leading occupational psychologist, and a serial tech entrepreneur, Ian Monk.
Large enterprises globally use our services to make high-quality decisions about hiring, developing, succession planning, and reskilling their employees at scale.Â
Our typical customers are large organizations from sectors such as financial services, technology, telecoms, and retail, who are looking to adopt a skills-based approach to improve their hiring, talent mobility, and/or development.
Our solutions have won multiple awards, and we secured £7.7 million in Series A funding in 2023.
Q: We're hearing a lot about a skills-gap crisis. What does that mean, and how does it impact organizations?
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has described the skills-gap crisis as one of the great challenges of our time. The workplace is changing rapidly and new skill requirements are emerging at a rate too fast to fill - think about the surge in demand for AI skills over the past 12 months.Â
Our survey of HR leaders found that 63% are struggling to recruit the skills they need, while 46% report that developing/upskilling employees in line with changing job requirements is a major workforce challenge. Organizations simply can’t keep up:
- High-growth roles are unfilled
- Many employees need upskilling
It is having serious consequences for business growth. According to PwC research, over half of CEOs believe labor and skills shortages will significantly impact profitability in their industry over the next 10 years.Â
Q: For years, we've been told about the high demand for technical skills, leading many students to choose STEM majors for secure and lucrative careers. Is that still a good strategy for the future?
There will still be high demand but there is a shift occurring. The half-life of skills - the period of time a skill is innovated, flourishes, and then becomes irrelevant - is shortening.Â
IBM has suggested that for technical skills it has dropped as low as 2.5 years. That means the average worker now needs to learn new technical skills twice as often as they did only a few years ago.Â
With technical skills changing so quickly, employers are starting to put more emphasis on the behavioral/soft skills required for success in roles, and whether candidates are aligned with the organization’s culture and values - hallmarks of durable individuals that can be upskilled, reskilled, and grow in line with the company’s requirements.Â
A LinkedIn study found that 92% of talent professionals now believe that soft skills matter as much or more than hard skills. As a result, we’re seeing a growing proportion of companies dropping degree requirements from jobs, and adopting a skills-based approach to hiring, where candidates are recruited based on their skills and behavioral fit, rather than their education and experience.
In the tech world, for instance, research by The Burning Glass Institute reports that only 29% of IBM's listings for a Software Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer require a degree. Robin MacDonald, Director at tech recruitment company Harvey Nash told the BBC recently:
"There's no reason a QA needs to have a degree to do that job. We can train those people in months."
Q: What advice would you give to someone early in their career? What skills should they focus on? And for someone in the middle of their career, with 20+ years of experience, how should they approach their skills development?
Generation Z is characterized by its appetite for learning and development, which means it is well-aligned with the accelerating pace of upskilling and reskilling.Â
However, there is some evidence that many early career hires lack the soft skills desired by employers. Research by the ISE, for instance, suggests that there is a need to develop work-appropriate written and verbal communication skills to make them more ‘career ready’, as well as improve other soft skills such as resilience and self-motivation. With a growing focus on soft skills, these may be important areas of development.Â
Meanwhile, the changing recruitment landscape will also have implications for more seasoned professionals if a skills-based approach to recruitment puts less stock in experience.
For individuals from either generation, the onus is on them to identify employers who are skills-focused with a culture of learning and constant development to ensure ongoing upskilling and reskilling.
Here at Spotted Zebra, we categorize those individuals as having the soft skills that make them Right For the Future.
Q: Climbing the corporate ladder has been a traditional goal for many professionals: choose a major in college, set yourself up for a life-long career, and get promoted along the way. Is this still a realistic career path for most professionals?
Historically, most workers have had linear career paths. However, estimates suggest that around a third of employees globally will see their jobs disrupted by AI and tech over the next decade.Â
Some jobs will change and others will simply be automated out of existence. Businesses don’t want to be caught in a cycle of making employees redundant from roles that have become obsolete and hiring talent with emerging skills that are fiercely in demand. They need to create more sustainable workforces.Â
That means identifying and recruiting individuals who are a good behavioral and cultural fit for the organization so that they can be retrained, reskilled, and retained as job/skill requirements change. This is a win-win for the company and employees.Â
Businesses avoid the costs of redundancy, recruitment, and onboarding, with estimates suggesting it’s 6 times more expensive to hire from the outside than to build from within. Meanwhile, employees gain new skills in high-growth roles, with this focus on their development driving engagement and loyalty.Â
So the generation joining the global workforce now may see their careers change multiple times during their working lives, even while working for the same organization. Linear careers will become less common, and ‘squiggly’ careers will become the norm.Â
