You can’t escape the call for soft skills.
As AI increasingly augments repetitive tasks, human connection is becoming more valuable in many workplaces. Even in technical fields, like engineering, developing skills that allow you to collaborate with others can help you prove your worth.
“Equally important are your soft skills, like critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and teamwork,” LinkedIn’s VP of Engineering for Talent Solutions, Prashanthi Padmanabhan, recently told Business Insider.
The rising importance of soft skills doesn’t mean you need to suddenly become a social butterfly at work — although that might not hurt. Workplace observers have said that extroverted personalities can offer an advantage in the current workforce because human-centered tasks can’t be as easily offloaded by AI.
But which soft skills are most important? And how can you highlight the ones you possess when looking for a new job? Business Insider spoke with seven workforce transformation experts, as well as executives from LinkedIn, IBM, and Cisco about the soft skills that will be most important in the AI era.
Read on to learn more about three skills they identified:
1. Problem solving
Your therapist’s advice may only be as good as the information you share with them — and the same goes for AI.
Large language models can generate instant suggestions, but it’s up to employees to identify the right problems, craft effective prompts, and determine the best course of action based on the insights it spits out.
“Even if AI is helping with consulting work, it’s still not so great,” said Michael Housman, founder and lead strategist at AI-ccelerator, a firm specializing in AI education and consulting. That means job seekers should work on developing skill sets that are “complementary to what machines are really good at,” Housman told Business Insider.
Housman, who is also the author of “Future Proof: Transform Your Business with AI (or Get Left Behind),” said that job seekers should focus on developing — and highlighting — their complex problem-solving skills. That means thinking about how to solve complicated challenges with “ambiguous inputs and metrics for success,” he said.
Guy Diedrich, Cisco’s senior vice president and global innovation officer, told Business Insider previously that critical thinking and problem-solving will become crucial as the pace of AI innovations leads to companies making significant ethical decisions. He said “asking the right questions” about what should be done will be the most important skill humans can develop.
2. Emotional intelligence
Alex King, founder and managing director of ExpandIQ, told Business Insider that self-awareness and the ability to read the room will become increasingly necessary in the AI age.
That involves tapping into your “gut feeling” and understanding situations where you need to lean in or step back, he said.
“People who have those soft skills around self-awareness and emotional intelligence are going to do really well in the future, because that’s obviously something AI cannot do,” said King, who also served as the former head of global talent acquisition at software-development firm Integrate.
Ruchir Puri, IBM’s chief scientist, similarly told Business Insider that while most successful CEOs probably have a high IQ, their success relies more on their ability to connect with others and communicate efficiently, which he refers to as the “emotional quotient” and “relationship quotient.”
“The advice I’ll give is always be empathetic,” Puri said. “Put yourself in their shoes and see why they are reacting the way they are.”
That level of awareness also extends to communication and ensuring that there’s “clarity” in the way you’re expressing ideas.
“Don’t just express a concept. Make sure the concept is at a level that they can understand,” Puri said, adding that “it’s not just what you say; it’s how you say it.”
3. Creativity and Imagination
With AI augmenting more busy work, many executives have said that there will be more time for “deep work,” including expansive thinking and idea generation.
That could be especially true in software engineering. As AI accelerates the process required to launch products and helps solve the issue of “scarcity of developers,” Cisco’s CPO Jeetu Patel previously told Business Insider that imagination will be “the only constraint.”
That means there will likely be a greater emphasis on developing fresh, high-quality ideas.
Terri Horton, an AI strategy and workforce transformation consultant at the boutique advisory firm FuturePath, told Business Insider that creativity is becoming increasingly important. Not only does that mean coming up with unique ideas for how to do your job, but it also includes thinking about where AI can be applied to make work more efficient.
“If we are replacing or removing, let’s say, 30% of the tasks that are associated with the role and replacing them with AI, what else can you do?” Horton said. “How can you leverage your creativity to work collaboratively with your functional leader or to help think about how that role can be redesigned?”
LinkedIn’s Padmanabhan, told Business Insider that candidates are increasingly using the interview process to highlight their creativity by showcasing a concept they have brought to life.
“If you don’t have the coding experience, but you have a brilliant idea in your head — just build something,” Padmanabhan said.
