The state of soft skills

It so happened that soft skills pretty much helped me in my career. For example, after only 9 months of work at Rambler, where I came as a simple frontend developer, I was offered to become the leader of the group, because my leader saw in me the potential and a sufficient level of development of the necessary flexible skills.

However, despite the entire hype surrounding the topic of soft skills, many developers are still confident that in order to switch from grade to grade, you just need to program a little better. In turn, I thought that if the same amount of effort that is required to pump hard skills to move from middle to senior developer is invested in the development of soft skills, career advancement can be even more effective.

Therefore, I decided to try to prove the thesis that soft skills are more important for career success than hard skills. And in order not to be subjective and refer only to my own experience, I studied the materials on the topic, conducted my own survey, analyzed the answers using a small amount of mathematics, and now I want to share the results.

From one of the first versions of the study, I spoke at FrontendConf last year, instead of an article, you can watch a video .

How did the concept of "soft skills"

In 1959, for the first time in the course of research in the US Army, the item “supporting skills and knowledges” was added to the problem statement for officers, which became the prototype of soft skills.



For example, in order to check the porthole of a fighter, it was considered useful for a military man to be able to determine the readings of a voltmeter and ammeter.

13 years later, in 1972, the CONARC Soft Skills Conference was held, where a new concept was officially used.



It says that soft skills are important skills that accompany the main job. And also that hard skills are what we know well, and soft skills are something that we know almost nothing about. This is an interesting statement, but we will not build on it.

At the moment, there are a lot of options for classifications and lists of flexible skills, so for now we will not focus on specific skills. I will talk about soft skills in a generalized sense, and you do not necessarily consider all of them as such.

What skills are important for employees

I decided to start with the annual (I took the version from 2018) LinkedIn study on the skills that need to be developed.

Below are the results of a survey of direct managers on the importance of certain skills. Four of the six skills can be attributed to soft skills.


The opinions of the heads of companies are almost the same, only leadership becomes a little more important:

Surprisingly, but:

• 92% of executives believe that soft skills are just as or more important than hard skills.
• 89% of managers find it extremely difficult to find an employee with the necessary level of soft skills.

How to teach flexible skills

In search of an answer to this question, I found an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal, which in turn had a link to a study by the Iowa Department of Education. Indeed, the department’s website provides six important skills for success in the 21st century that can be learned: productivity and responsibility, critical thinking, complex communication, creativity, teamwork, flexibility and adaptability.



LinkedIn is called about the same skills are most in demand and give them an "inspirational" explanation.

• Creativity. While robots optimize old ideas, creative employees come up with solutions to the problems of the future.
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LinkedIn 57% , - , -.

But are these results relevant to us? Still, these studies are oriented to the West.

To find out, I decided to conduct my own survey. I started with people whom I interviewed in the Frontend Weekend podcast , and then already distributed them on social networks and at other conferences.



The survey had 7 skill groups. For each skill there were such answer options: there is no skill, there is from birth, received with experience, consciously developed. And I also asked to evaluate on a five-point scale how much the group of skills completely influenced the career development of the respondent.

Under the spoilers are the histograms of the distribution of the responses, which we will analyze in more detail below.

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“I always wanted to be a good specialist, above all, a high position did not interest me. And a good specialist in our field cannot do without constant study , you cannot get one practice here, ”- Andrey Melikhov.

In the skills of self-presentation, by the way, for the first time, answers according to importance are nonmonotonously distributed. Those who rated the influence of self-presentation skills on their careers by 3 points are more than those who rated it by 4.

“I learned to sell myself as a specialist and promote my ideas. As a result, he began to receive many job offers, significantly increased his salary, was able to agree on doing interesting things along with useful ones. He began to travel more, ”- Nikita Dubko.

If you think that the results are biased or my sample is not wide enough, take a survey and help me collect more data.

But the already existing results, and especially the fact that about half of the respondents rated the degree of influence on a career by 5 out of 5 points for each skill group, shows that soft skills are useful. So they need to be developed.

What skills to develop

Obviously, it’s unlikely that all skills can be pumped immediately. But at the same time it’s not necessary to develop everything, we’ll try to set priorities.

We will rely on:

• Iowa Department of Education study.
• Top 5 Flexible Skills to Learn in 2019 from LinkedIn.
• Results of our own survey.

Easiest rating

It is logical to try to calculate the price / quality ratio and begin development with the most profitable ones. In the first version of the analysis, which was done on the knee in an hour, for this I came up with the following formulas:

• Price is determined by the skill development of those who answered "got to experience" and "deliberately developed", and "getting the experience of" affect the assessment of 2 times less: development_value = (gained_by_experience / 2 + gained_by_development) / people_number.
• Just how useful skill that takes into account the responses 4 and 5 in the question about the impact, with the "quartet" in analogy to 2 times less important when calculating: help_value = (fours / 2 + fives) / people_number.
• To obtain a final figure, I tried to multiply two evaluations received before: final_value = development_value * help_value.

The table shows the results for all 32 skills from my survey.



In the Iowa and LinkedIn columns, the “+” is opposite the skills, which are also listed in the respective studies. Thus, the most profitable from the point of view of the ratio of the price of development and utility are: teamwork, persuasion and argumentation, time management.

Naturally, it was a rather naive rating, the coefficients did not rely on anything, and multiplying the estimates was generally a stupid undertaking. Therefore, the next step I decided to do more and more strictly from a mathematical point of view.

Rating based on NPS and simple math

In the case of calculating the usefulness of skills, I decided to refer to the index of consumer loyalty (Net Promoter Score).



If projected NPS model on our results, we get the following formula: value_index = (fives - threes - twos - ones) / (vote_number - noskill_number). That is, only a definitely strong influence on 5 points goes to plus, and on 3, 2 and 1 to minus.

But determining the price of a skill is more difficult. I consulted with machine learning and data analysis specialists and chose a simple but well-founded model. And what's important, I revised the price indicator - the higher the price, the worse.

The influence of factors on the price of a skill:

• If a large number of people do not have any skill, this increases the price of its development (we assume that people know what each skill means).
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Based on these assumptions, we derive the final price formula:, cost_index = (1 - experience_index) * (1 - develop_index) / (1 - noskill_index) / (1 - born_index)where column_index = column_number / vote_number.

The obtained values ​​of price and utility will be the coordinates for our skills: price along the OX axis, utility along the OY axis.

All the resulting skills space can be divided into 4 clusters. ( Visualization from the Jupyter Notebook - do not judge strictly. )



In the lower left corner are conditionally “Cheap and useless” - skills that are not so difficult to develop and, according to the survey participants, they are not of much use in their careers. It's funny that for most of these skills there are various express trainings, which once again confirms that they are not so difficult to pump.



The category “Expensive and useless” includes: charisma, humor, responsibility and independence. That is, that, as humor, is at a high level from birth, but it is difficult to develop.



“Expensive and useful”: fast learner, initiative, creativity. These skills are hard to develop, but if you succeed, then there should be many benefits for a career.

Most of all, of course, we are interested in “Cheap and useful” skills, here they are:



It turned out that reflection is the most useful skill , but far from the cheapest one presented.

There are also communication skills and the search and analysis of information, which, according to the results of the initial assessment, was a good skill.

But it seemed to me that some more useful information could be obtained from this data.

Skill correlation

I remembered the course of mathematical statistics and tried to calculate the correlation of all skills in pairs.


https://sandark7.imtqy.com/FrontendConf2019/#79

Now I will explain what all this mosaic means and what we need to pay attention to. First, the darker the color, the less correlation. The lighter, the stronger the change in one value affects the value of another. A strong correlation along the diagonal is explained by the fact that these are skills from the same group and it is logical that they are interconnected - this is not so interesting to us.

More interesting are individual bursts. For example, according to my research, it turned out that the development of one of the skills in these pairs provokes the development of the second:

• Persuasion and Argumentation - Criticality of Thinking.
• Discipline - Perception of criticism.
• Perception of Criticism - Self-Confidence.
• Reflection - The ability to make decisions.

For some pairs of skills, the correlation coefficient has a negative value, that is, when one develops, the other fails on the contrary. This connection is most strongly expressed for initiative and time management: the more initiative you are, the worse it is with time management, and vice versa .

I also calculated the correlation coefficient of skill groups using the results of answers to a question about importance.



A positive correlation of the importance of skills (the more important one turned out, the more important the other):

• Organization - Thinking.
• Communication - Self-Presentation.
• Flexibility - Communication.

Negative correlation is observed only in one pair: Self-education - Flexibility.

The dependence of the development of skills from each other

In the end, I decided to recall what was still in the course of mathematical statistics, and tried to calculate the conditional probability of an unconscious skill acquisition subject to the conscious development of another. Conditional probability is the probability of the occurrence of one event, provided that another event has already occurred, is calculated by the formula$$$P(A|B)=\frac{P(A \cap B)}{P(B)}$. Applying it to our results, we have the following:


https://sandark7.imtqy.com/FrontendConf2019/#87 The

conditional probability in the pair “Logical thinking - Decision making” turned out to be the strongest. Obviously, if you develop logical thinking, it will be easier to make decisions, which only confirms the adequacy of the calculations.
It turns out almost like in DnD: for example, you download multitasking, you get independence points as a bonus. And especially valuable in this study for me was that its results did not contradict common sense.

How to develop

In addition to the questions already mentioned, in the survey I asked: "If you consciously developed a specific group of skills, then how." Let's look at an example of statistics of answers about self-education.



As you can see, people are more likely to seek knowledge in books than in training or courses. If books are closer to you too, you can start developing flexible skills with John Sonmez’s book, The Path of the Programmer (in the original Soft Skills: The Software Developer's Life Manual). Or first you can watch the master-class of Sasha Shinkevich and Nikita Dubko “Soft Skills for Introverts” and outline an individual plan in a couple of hours.

In general, it is generally accepted that soft skills are inherent in extroverts. But introverts have an advantage: they know how to analyze themselves and their actions from the inside. For example, I consider myself an introvert, but this does not prevent me from working with people and developing soft skills.

Even if you do not have very developed soft skills, you can choose a few that you like more and which you will not be very difficult to develop. So, firstly, you will see practical benefits in them, and secondly, it will indirectly affect any additional skills, and the glomerulus will begin to unwind.

And I would like to end with a thesis from a LinkedIn study that soft skills become especially important with the development of artificial intelligence. It seems that the only thing that robots will never learn is just soft skills.

After speaking at FrontendConf, I was asked a lot of good and tricky questions. You may find something useful in recording this conversation .

Now, when most companies are rebuilding processes for full-fledged remote work, the required set of soft skills for a programmer is changing. Next week I will speak at RIT ++ with the report “Soft Skills Remote” and try to analyze and tell you which flexible skills at the time go by the wayside and which become extremely important. In addition, the festival’s two-week program will include a series of lectures and master classes on communication and soft skills. The event starts on May 25 - you can still have time to join.