A Case for Soft Skills in Certification

The certification industry for many years has focused predominantly on validating the technical knowledge and skills of professionals. However, whether someone is able to meet or exceed expectations in the workplace is not just based on their technical expertise, but also on their soft skills. I believe certification programs should seriously consider incorporating soft skills assessments into their certification processes.

They go by many names, non-cognitive skills, people skills, 21^st century skills, professional skills, but I’ll just call them soft skills. They are the interpersonal competencies, personality traits, and personal attributes that go beyond the technical knowledge and skills necessary to perform job functions. They include attributes such as bedside manners, communication, emotional intelligence, collaboration, teamwork, empathy, creativity, and so much more. These soft skills are becoming more relevant for professionals to demonstrate in the modern workplace, especially with artificial intelligence and the internet subsidizing a good chunk of technical knowledge. Take the medical field as an example. It is no longer enough for a medical assistant to know how to obtain vital signs or a physician to be able to diagnose a patient. Medical professionals need to demonstrate good bedside manners, empathy, and be able to listen to patients to fully understand their situation. Psychometricians can’t just be good at analyzing data and writing reports, they also need to be able to explain complex information to non-technical audiences so they can understand and make meaningful decisions. Yet, these softer skills are rarely assessed, let alone taught.

Soft skills can be assessed through several methods: self-reports, situational judgement tests (SJTs), interviews, and 360-feedback measures, to name a few. Some organizations have included a soft skills assessment as a step in the process to obtain a certification while others have added them as additional opportunities candidates can take advantage of through professional development. Most of these required assessments do not have a passing standard (cut score) but instead provide candidates with information so they understand their level of competence in various soft skills. Some even ask candidates to draft a plan to develop their soft skills in the future. Part of the reason candidates can’t fail soft skills assessments in the same way they could traditional certification exams is because soft skills are more difficult to develop than technical knowledge and they have not been as widely accepted in credentialing. However, I believe that over time soft skills assessments will shift to become more relied upon as a selection tool (maybe even rivaling technical assessments).

And why should the credentialing industry make a change to how they’ve done things for so long? Because the benefits of soft skills are pretty obvious and well researched. Healthcare patients report greater satisfaction and a reduction in anxiety when healthcare practitioners convey empathy and communicate better (Howick et al., 2018; Stein et al., 2005). Soft skills such as adaptability and time management are becoming more important for global and remote teams (Poláková, Suleimanová, Madzík, Copuš, Molnárová, Polednová, 2023). Emotional intelligence also seems to predict job performance fairly well (O’Boyle, Humphrey, Pollack, Hawver, Story, 2011). Another reason the credentialing community needs to consider this change is due to something else that is causing waves: artificial intelligence (AI). With a lot of technical knowledge just a few finger clicks away, many professions are reconsidering how work is done and what is expected of those doing the job. However, while AI might be able to subsidize some technical knowledge on the job, it is difficult to imagine AI supplementing our softer skills. Whenever one calls customer service and hears the automated AI voice, we begrudgingly go through the steps to finally talk to a real human who can help us.

Ultimately, our world is changing. Artificial intelligence is changing the very nature of what we do for our jobs. The need for technical skills will never go away, but their importance relative to soft skills will likely change, and drastically so for some professions. Professionals already have a good idea of what they need to know in order to succeed in a new job and how to develop those technical skills, but we are doing little when it comes to soft skills which are just as much contributing to their on-the-job success. My recommendation to certifying bodies is to consider how you could incorporate soft skills into the certification process.