Soft skills strengthen other skills and abilities, and teams with these skills will be equipped to adapt more quickly and easily as the future of work continues to evolve. 
Yolanda Lau (Forbes Humans Resources Councils Member)
“Soft Skills Are Essential To The Future Of Work”
The Rise of Soft Skills
The coming of AI and automation to the workplace means that many tasks that people undertake today may well be automated. Whilst technological advancements have consistently changed the workplace over the past two hundred and fifty years, the pace of change today, and the potential for disruption to the way we work, are essentially unprecedented.
Having been onsite at Adastral Park since 2013, we’ve seen the demand for tech skills soar as companies increasingly innovate and automate. But matching this demand is an increase in the requirement for human or soft skills.
Last year the World Economic Forum identified ten skills that would be in demand in the next few years. A good proportion of those skills fall under the soft, or meta, skills umbrella – critical thinking and analysis; creativity, originality and initiative; leadership and social influence; reasoning and problem-solving. These are skills that the new tech will not, at least for the foreseeable future, be able to take on.
Whilst ‘hard’ digital skills are rightly seen as essential in today’s workplace, it’s the ‘uniquely human’ skills that machines, for the foreseeable future, cannot emulate that are increasingly in demand.
Louise Jones, Director of Education, Community & Partnerships at ThingLink
According to a report by Manpower Group, 43% of organisations said it was harder to teach soft skills as they are both hard to identify and difficult to develop.
Next Steps
VR and Soft Skills Training
VR training scenarios simulate realistic workplace scenarios and are a highly sophisticated form of role play. Using virtual embodiment, the learners interact with a virtual character, then swap bodies and watch an avatar of themselves as the situation is played back. The impact of this new perspective encourages self-reflection and embeds learning from practical experience within a virtual environment.
Why use Virtual Reality?
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- Employees in VR courses can be trained up to four times faster, PwC (2020).
- VR in training boosts engagement and knowledge retention. Learners are more focused as VR is immersive, PwC (2020).
- Using virtual reality is more effective than classroom and e-learn training at teaching soft skills concepts, PwC (2020).
- VR learning provides a way to train employees where it is not always practical to do so in the real world.
- Both employers and employees want bite-sized training that is focused and applicable, which is exactly what VR offers, ManPower (2021).
To find out more about the VR and Soft Skills courses we offer, please follow this link.
Want to learn more about the growth of Artificial Intelligence and VR, then follow these links:
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