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veryone talks about soft skills, but few truly measure them. Discover why shifting from intention to data-driven core skills is the key to organizational performance.
Soft skills have reached a consensus. Everyone talks about them. Yet between the discourse and operational reality, a gap remains. Here's why, and what it means concretely for your organization.
According to LinkedIn Learning, 92% of HR professionals consider soft skills as important as, or more important than, technical skills. The World Economic Forum places them at the heart of key competencies through 2027. Executive teams mention them in their speeches. Recruiters integrate them into their selection criteria. Higher education institutions include them in their pedagogical frameworks.
And yet: most organizations still don't have the tools to structure, measure, and truly manage them.
This isn't a lack of intention. It's a lack of structure.
In this article, we explore:
For a long time, performance relied primarily on technical skills. That model has shown its limits.
Professions are evolving at a pace that training programs struggle to keep up with. According to LinkedIn, technical skills become obsolete on average every 18 months. The rise of artificial intelligence is refocusing human added value on what machines cannot replicate: the ability to adapt, make decisions under uncertainty, collaborate, and understand others.
In this context, what makes the difference today is no longer just what you know how to do. It's how you do it, and with whom.
Unlike hard skills, soft skills are not specific to a profession or sector. They apply across all professional, academic, and social situations.
At Rising Up, we prefer to call them core skills, because the word "soft" is misleading. These competencies are neither vague nor secondary. They are grounded in precise, identifiable, developable cognitive mechanisms, and above all, measurable ones.
They are structured around three key characteristics:
Soft skills are no longer a differentiating factor. They have become a prerequisite.
They appear in recruitment processes, professional frameworks, pedagogical programs at leading universities and business schools, and in the HR development strategies of organizations. 91% of managers say they are ready to hire a candidate primarily based on their soft skills, even without the exact required technical experience.
The question is no longer whether soft skills matter. It's how to manage them seriously.
This is the most common blind spot on this topic.
When you ask HR managers or training directors where their organization stands on soft skills, the vast majority answer: "We're already fairly advanced." They mention organized workshops, deployed training programs, tools in use.
But when you dig deeper, one observation becomes clear: many organizations are at the stage of intention, not structure.
The difference is fundamental.
Intention means offering training and hoping it develops competencies. Structure means precisely defining which competencies to develop, for which profiles, with which indicators, and measuring progress over time.
Here are three concrete situations we regularly observe:
Situation 1 — A company has been running communication and management workshops for several years. Participants leave satisfied. But no one knows whether behaviors actually changed six months later, or to what extent this impacts team performance.
Situation 2 — A higher education institution integrates soft skills into its competency framework. But assessment remains at each teacher's discretion, with no consistent criteria or year-on-year tracking.
Situation 3 — An HR department uses a personality test during recruitment. Results provide a profile. But they don't allow candidates to be compared on precise criteria, nor do they measure competency development once in the role.
In all three cases, there is an approach. But no real management.
This confusion between intention and structure has concrete consequences.
In recruitment, decisions remain subjective, hard to defend and barely comparable from one candidate to another. Perception biases play a bigger role than data.
In training, budgets are invested without visibility into real impact. Initiatives multiply without overall coherence.
In HR strategy, the absence of reliable indicators makes it impossible to identify where to focus efforts, or to justify investments to senior leadership.
In every area of business management, measurement is a prerequisite for effective steering. Commercial performance is tracked with indicators. Operational quality too. Customer satisfaction too.
Soft skills are no different. And yet, they remain the only performance lever still largely managed by intuition.
According to a McKinsey survey, companies that prioritize soft skills are 35% more likely to outperform their competitors. But that requires being able to identify which competencies to develop, for whom, and measure the evolution.
Classic personality tests provide profiles. They don't provide actionable data to compare individuals, track progression, or make objective HR decisions.
360° assessments depend on evaluator subjectivity and vary according to context and interpersonal relationships.
Behavioral observations in real situations are valuable, but rarely systematized or comparable at scale.
The result: organizations have information. But not data. And the distinction is crucial.
To move beyond these limits, soft skills must be treated for what they are: precise, measurable, developable and manageable competencies.
This requires clear frameworks, consistent evaluation criteria, and indicators tracked over time, exactly as is done for technical competencies. This is precisely what the soft skills platform enables at the organizational level.
The organizations that have truly structured their approach to soft skills share three characteristics.
They don't talk about "communication" or "leadership" as black boxes. They break these concepts down into precise, actionable competencies.
For example, communication breaks down into oral expression, synthetic reasoning and influencing ability. Leadership into proactivity, positivity and risk tolerance. Each competency has a definition, behavioral indicators and objective evaluation criteria. Discover the full list of our core skills and their definitions.
They measure competencies in a way that allows results to be compared across individuals, teams, cohorts, and over time. This isn't a snapshot at a single moment, it's continuous monitoring that identifies progressions and priority areas for development.
They don't deploy generic training programs. They identify the critical competencies for their specific challenges, whether preparing students for professional life, developing managers through transformation, or strengthening the performance of commercial teams.
Soft skills then become a strategic management lever, just like any other performance driver. Some organizations even go as far as certifying these competencies to recognize the achievements of their employees or students.
The question is no longer whether soft skills are important. It's determining where you actually stand, and where you want to go.
Here are the four maturity levels we observe in the field:
Level 1 — Discovery: Soft skills are rarely structured. A few initiatives exist on a one-off basis, with no overall coherence or indicators.
Level 2 — Structuring: Actions are being taken (training, workshops, tools), but they remain fragmented. There is still no framework or tracking over time.
Level 3 — Deployment: An approach is in place and tools are being used, but data remains difficult to leverage and overall coherence is still partial.
Level 4 — Leadership: Soft skills are integrated into a global strategy, reliably measured, and continuously managed. They constitute a genuine HR and pedagogical decision-making lever.
Most organizations that think they are at level 3 are actually at level 2.
Soft skills are no longer an HR trend. They are establishing themselves as a performance standard, in companies and higher education institutions alike.
But between their integration into discourse and their operational implementation, a significant gap remains. And it is precisely in closing this gap that organizations' ability to adapt, differentiate and perform sustainably is at stake today.
The good news: this gap can be measured. And what can be measured can be reduced.
Want to know where your organization really stands? Book a demo
References: LinkedIn Learning (2024), World Economic Forum – Future of Jobs Report (2023), McKinsey & Company, OpinionWay (2021)
From recruitment At development skills, Rising Up provides reliable behavioral data to guide your HR and educational choices.
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