Why it’s time we stopped talking about ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ skills

March 19, 2026 — 12:45pm

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The way we discuss skills at work is stuck in the past. For decades, we’ve used the simplistic binary of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ skills to describe different aspects of our job, but if we’re going to survive in the workplaces of the future, we need better language.

Let’s begin with what we mean by hard and soft skills, a categorisation first used by the US Army in the 1960s. They coined the terms in training manuals to distinguish between capabilities required to operate heavy military machines and those needed when dealing with “people and paper”.

The definition has since broadened to hard skills covering anything that requires specialised knowledge or high technical ability, like bookkeeping,........

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