Conversations about soft skills are often, well, soft. While most executives believe skills like communication or adaptability will only grow in importance as AI changes the nature of work, the conversation often stops at that high level.
David Deming, however, talks about soft skills—which he calls “higher-order skills”—in refreshingly concrete terms. (The term “soft skills” was coined by the U.S. Army to refer to skills unrelated to machinery use; the word “soft” has been criticized for devaluing, misleading, or perpetuating gender stereotypes about these essential skills.) The dean of Harvard College, Deming is an economist who’s published several papers on the growing importance of abilities like decision making and social skills for work.
We spoke with Deming about those abilities, and the essential role that education plays in developing them. Here are highlights from that conversation, edited for length and clarity:
Why do you think soft skills have become more important over time?
These are skills that are in motion. You can’t have a classroom where you say, ‘Okay, fourth period, we’re going to teach social skills.’ It’s not really about the content. It’s learning how to work with others, how to deal with information, and how to make decisions in a fluid, unpredictable world. That’s the kind of thing that becomes more important when you’ve got technology that does more and more of the routine, predictable, scripted stuff.
Running a meeting? You might come in with a game plan, but you have to adjust in the moment based on how it’s going, [and] on whether your colleagues are having a good day or a bad day. If I’m working with you on a project and you’re upset, is it because your dog died? Is it because you don’t like something I said? I need a lot of context about you to figure that out. That’s a cognitively complicated thing. We call them soft skills, but really they’re actually more complicated.
There’s this famous teaching tool called Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. It’s organized with levels. The base is factual knowledge. Then you go to comprehension. You go farther up—integrating knowledge, decision making and judgment, and finally creativity. When you look at the things that we mostly test in school, they’re in the bottom two levels of the pyramid. If you take the SAT, it’s mostly comprehension and factual knowledge.
It seems like technology’s abilities are climbing up that pyramid…
Yes, that’s how I think about it. I like to call [soft skills] higher-order skills because it properly acknowledges the hierarchy. You can’t integrate facts in a way that generates new conclusions unless you know the facts in the first place and you can comprehend them. The logic of the pyramid is that each thing builds on the other thing. In order to build soft skills, you need to have hard skills.
How else are soft skills, such as teamwork, complementary to hard skills?
If you and I are going to work together on a team, what my social skills do is reduce the coordination cost. It makes it such that you and I only need to meet for 15 minutes to arrive at a division of labor instead of for an hour.
The value of social skills is much higher for people who have something of value to trade. If I’m great on a team, but I’m actually bad at everything [else], it doesn’t really help you very much. At the same time, if I’m really good at a bunch of things, but I’m hard to work with, you also can’t achieve the benefits of coordination. The two things go together.
How can companies develop soft skills in their employees?
I don’t think it’s very easy to do because in a company, especially one that faces competitive pressures, you’re constantly worried about losing talent and you’re trying to [improve] a bottom line. The companies that spend a lot of time doing training tend to be bigger companies with a lot of market power.
I’m not against employer training, but I don’t think we should expect it to be a substitute for schooling. I get nervous when people say, ‘Well, you don’t really need to learn anything in college. You can just learn on the job.’ I don’t think that’s true, actually. There’s a lot of general skill building that happens in college that doesn’t really happen in the workplace. It can happen sometimes by serendipity, but it’s not built into the design of the job experience.
In a 2019 New York Times article, you wrote that a liberal arts education develops soft skills like critical thinking. How?
I think of critical thinking as trying to discern truth from fiction or exaggeration in a piece of text or a perspective. Why is this person speaking this way? What are their experiences that lead them to think about this, and how should I evaluate this piece of information given the perspective that it’s from? That’s the kind of thing you learn in literature.
Reading different pieces of writing on the same event can give you a different perspective and an increased ability to take the perspective of others, which helps you be a good teammate. If you and I are going to work together, it’s helpful for me to put myself in your shoes. What’s Jacob thinking about? What’s motivating him? There are a lot of elements of a good liberal arts education that build those skills.
That doesn’t mean that the average liberal arts education and the average college does it as well as it could. It probably doesn’t. I don’t mean to suggest that if you just go to a liberal arts college, you’re going to build those skills automatically. But the principle of a liberal arts education is that it’s supposed to be broad and transferable. It’s not supposed to be vocational.
In the same article, you wrote that ‘we should be wary of the impulse to make college curriculums ever more technical and career-focused. Rapid technological change makes the case for breadth even stronger.’ Is that still your view?
Yes, I would say even more [so]. Let me give you one example of why I think that. A few years ago, we experienced the rapid rise of coding bootcamps. There was VC money behind these coding bootcamps, and there was this idea that this was going to revolutionize education.
Then ChatGPT and Claude Code came out, and you can now vibe code in conversational English. That illustrates the perils of an overly vocational education, which is that you develop some set of learning for a technology that changes. The faster that change cycles through, the harder it is to pull off.