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Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

wsj.com

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Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#81

Post by VLM »

KirinDave wrote: post #68
Havoc wrote: post #2

Strange - I usually associate "soft skills" more with leadership, people skills etc. And yeah they are in short supply because you can't teach them directly. The employees sorta need to pick them up from experience.

> And yeah they are in short supply because you can't teach them directly. Why can't you teach them directly?

What we define as "teach" in the west is specifically designed to produce and select interchangeable factory drones with no social skills or creativity. Consider the K12 stereotype of filling out arithmetic worksheets or conjugation of foreign language verbs. Then we stack rank the kids by obedience to authority which usually anti-correlates with creativity and social skills to determine their educational path, and eventually give the "winners" jobs where their management are confused why they have no social skills and no creativity.

Imagine a classroom of employees head down silently circling multiple choice worksheets "circle the correct two characteristics of creativity in each set". That's how we'd "teach". Even worse, we'd probably pick the class teachers by who did the best on the last generation of social skills worksheets.

Meanwhile the creative or socially skilled are going to tend to not have corporate jobs. Or they'll demand more than minimal money.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#82

Post by ofir_geller »

gameshot911 wrote: post #31
guitarbill wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops. Maybe I don't understand "contrarian" as well as I should. Wikipedia says "A contrarian is a person who takes up a contrary position, especially a position that is opposed to that of the majority, regardless of how unpopular it may be", which to me reads like a reactionary thing. People with different views, that's just how they think. They don't do it for kicks to antagonize people. Right?

The way I think of 'contrarian' is someone who takes an opposing position strictly because it is in opposition to others, and not due to sincerely help beliefs or the actual merits of the position. But I think I should apologize to you and the parent post. I just saw an opportunity to come off as being a little clever. I have no idea if the parent poster was actually trying to be contrarian or not. And while I'm just…

I have a different understanding, it's not resistance for resistance sake, it's the willingness to dissent when you disagree. The first thing that pop to my mind is a book by Christopher Hitchens called "Letters to a Young Contrarian". While he enjoyed arguments he did not argue for argument sake for a position he did not hold.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#83

Post by Retric »

cerrelio wrote: post #63
Retric wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second type is generally better dealt with indirectly so it becomes the first type. Daily stand up taking 1 hour every day. If you say it's a waste of time let's cancel it then people look bad. If you say, we are wasting time let's get faster then management is rarely going to complain. Do we really need 30 people in this meeting? What if we had someone send out the meeting notes? etc. Granted, this assumes peopl…

I dislike that passive-aggressive dynamic of converting the second type of thinking/feedback to the first. And that dynamic generally has a name: "politics". I've been on teams where I had to use rhetoric to convince a (non-technical) manager that following standard design practices like low coupling/high cohesion, etc. results in more robust software. What's sad about that whole political dynamic is that it wears pe…

I don't really like politics, but 10,000 years ago people in mud brick huts where taking politics and today people in mud brick huts are still talking politics. If nothing else politics works and ignoring things that work just make your life harder. Also of note, mud brick huts have been around for a really long time.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#84

Post by [deleted] »

enraged_camel wrote: post #71
dustingetz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think command and control management structures have a lot of benefits at scale. Maybe at scale a company's competitive edge is essentially about executing on information, and information asymmetry, which is why things like trust and politics are more important than shipping efficiently. Just an idea.

Not sure I'm following. Can you elaborate?

[deleted]

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#85

Post by dingbat »

adekok wrote: post #19
guitarbill wrote: post #7

Thank god the Wall Street Journal is encouraging critical thinking, and more importantly fostering the discussion by putting articles like this out for everybody to read /s On a more serious note, I don't believe this is true. In every place I've been, school, university, corporate jobs, the "critical thinkers" always got marginalised. This was the case even if they were truly nice people who cared - i.e. not abrasiv…

> In every place I've been, school, university, corporate jobs, the "critical thinkers" always got marginalised. Because while they get things done, they challenge the status quo. When I've worked for large companies, the #1, #2, and #3 products of the company were management politics. Actually shipping anything was #4, maybe #5. Critical thinkers looked at that and went "we could do better", and got punished for it.

in a large company, if the main products are management politics, as you say, a capable critical thinker ought to be able to dominate that game, instead of focusing on relatively unimportant priorities like "shipping".

if someone tends to get marginalized, by definition that means they are ineffective at "getting things done".

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#86

Post by sbov »

lomojj wrote: post #56
dghughes wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need contrairian people as a balance to people who think they are infallible. Both should be a small percentage of society with the remaining majority willing to change if needed.

Being a contrarian is no more valuable than being a yes man. Neither has any societal value.

I can't disagree more with this statement. Echo chambers are dangerous. Just because everyone in the room agrees doesn't make it a good idea.

The kinder term for contrarian is devil's advocate. If no one else will, you need someone to present an opposing viewpoint.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#87

Post by Thriptic »

astazangasta wrote: post #50
ReallyAnonymous wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a >10,000 employee health care system as a physician. What I have seen is that the front line workers are considered disposable, and should be grateful for a job. The superstars ( always nice, compassionate, and excellent at their jobs) are not recognized by management and so when raises are given, everyone gets them, including the lazy ones. This disappoints the worker bees, and leads to incredible turnov…

I really don't give a shit if I'm being paid more than my fellows, hard-working or no. The only thing I care about in my pay level is: am I making enough to support my family in a decent lifestyle? This means I'm comparing against the cost of living, NOT what my coworkers make - I only care about my relative wage insofar as it indicates how most people are getting by. What I'm more interested in, as a smart person, i…

Your pay level relative to everyone else is the principle way the company acknowledges the value of your work. If I am making the same amount as a total underachiever, it signals that the company either doesn't care about my work or thinks I am also an underachiever.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#88

Post by aqwfgm »

curiousgal wrote: post #47
Edmond wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, quite odd to describe "soft skill" as critical thinking skills, ie cognitive skills. soft skill typically is social skill, the type of nebulous skill that while it may have value leaves huge room to interpretation.

The way I see it, critical thinking has a social aspect because an individual has to communicate those thoughts, or else how would we know they're critically thinking?

The way you see it, you could put there physics, engineering or any other hard skill just because you have to communicate what you've learned.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#89

Post by angry_octet »

mannykannot wrote: post #12

There seems to be a trend in management towards an unwarranted belief in the effectiveness and importance of superficial quantitative analysis, and two complementary myths that go along with the trend: a) any number you can assign to something is significant; b) anything you cannot assign a number to is not significant. Anyone approaching recruiting with this mindset is neither using critical thinking, nor likely to…

There has been an uptick in user of discredited techniques to screen in recruitment, stuff like MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), lots of pseudo science without measuring validity.

It seems like HR have been told to find people with soft skills and so they manufacture something that will give a rating and then rank candidates by that.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#90

Post by ThrustVectoring »

guitarbill wrote: post #7

Thank god the Wall Street Journal is encouraging critical thinking, and more importantly fostering the discussion by putting articles like this out for everybody to read /s On a more serious note, I don't believe this is true. In every place I've been, school, university, corporate jobs, the "critical thinkers" always got marginalised. This was the case even if they were truly nice people who cared - i.e. not abrasiv…

The WSJ isn't encouraging critical thinking here - it's making self-described "critical thinkers" feel like they're important and valuable people, thus convincing them to read the WSJ.
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