Abstract:

The present paper discusses the importance and influence of skills, mainly soft skills (or non-cognitive skills or interpersonal and personal skills or life skills or socio-emotional skills or human skills or people skills) and the ways they are being transformed in the recent dynamic labor markets. As employability, in the post-covid era, is largely affected by the pressure of global competition together with the rapid advances in New Technologies, it is apparent that typical degrees and certificates of any kind cannot alone guarantee the stability of a lifelong career. Meanwhile, employers are constantly seeking more skills from employees while demanding and expecting effectiveness and productivity. As a result, employers tend to experience skills’ shortages across a wide range of already skilled employees, while this demand is higher in some sectors and lower in others. Likewise employees usually feel the need to combine high performance together with high soft skills, yet due to the lack of typical metrics of soft skills, they tend to miss promotions and rewards. In addition, there are employees with an advanced set of soft skills which are not fully expressed mostly due to negative reactions to the existing working environment. The difficulties to form standard methodologies for measuring or matching human attributes are mainly related to the fact that soft skills are mostly personal, interpersonal and intimately linked to atomic habits, largely formulated by general environmental impacts including lifestyle, employment, studies, experiences, attitudes and beliefs. This diversity creates troubles in incorporating them into existing teaching and training curriculums. Yet, organizations and businesses often claim that they need to facilitate reskilling and upskilling, despite the strain, as companies need to make deep changes in processes, behaviors and attitudes among their employees, in order to flourish. Accordingly, the present paper focuses on two major parts: The first part tries to integrate the various theoretical and practical aspects of the issue, underlining the basic involved relations while the second part focuses on a pilot research study among Human Resources Executives in Greece trying to note their own experience in categorizing the critical soft skills in demand among various occupations in the Greek labor market, the ways soft skills are certified, the tools used for estimating soft skills during recruitments, the reasons for skills gaps and the chance of using soft skills as an indicator of job performance. Such executives have been selected as a valuable and representative sample for the needs of the present research, mostly due to the fact that they usually have a deeper knowledge of the current labor markets as well as extensive experience in offering a wide range of flexible, on-demand services and proposals that include soft skills training both in terms of reskilling and upskilling. The findings of the present research, hope to contribute to the coordination of the emerging skills among stakeholders (job seekers, employers, employees, training providers, etc.) in order to achieve sustainable employability and minimize gaps.

Keywords:

Skills, human skills, soft skills, digital skills, labor markets, employment, education, training, education and economic development, post-covid era, covid-19.