The truth is that soft skills will only grow in value as you progress throughout your career. This is true for two reasons: First, soft skills are going to be more valuable in the future for workers at all levels. Second, they are required for managerial roles and advancing in your career. Let’s look at both reasons in more depth.
After technology, soft skills are going to be the most critical growing skill category in the future, which is part of an ongoing trend. Interpersonal tasks at work have been rising over the past fifty years, as the need for routine manual and cognitive tasks (simple rules-based judgments, for example) have declined. This trend is now being accelerated by AI. As advanced technologies are increasingly utilized in the workplace to automate activities, there is a greater need for workers with finely tuned social and emotional skills to power human-to-human interactions which technology cannot easily replace.
Demand for workers with social and emotional skills is increasing. By 2030 workers in the United States and Europe will spend an average of 24 percent more hours using those skills. Specifically, there will be the greatest rise in demand for entrepreneurship and initiative-taking
These changes may also provide opportunities for those with less formal education. A survey of eighteen thousand people across fifteen countries reveals that while soft skills can be learned, they are not as directly tied to formal education as hard skills. And although job listings may not reflect the importance of soft skills, workers who are most proficient in them have higher rates of employment, higher salaries, and greater job satisfaction than those who aren’t.
A significant portion of the workforce will need to further develop their soft skills within the next five to ten years. In particular, tens of millions of midcareer, middle-aged workers in advanced economies will require reskilling. Employers are catching on to this trend and are beginning to recognize the importance of soft skills. In fact, 80 percent of C-suite executives worldwide say that reskilling at scale—including soft skills and hard ones—is a concern and a priority
Soft skills will also be more important in the future because no matter what role you start out in, advancing almost always includes managing others. And soft skills are essential for good leaders, who must rely on their relationships and the ability motivate their teams to succeed. Early in your career, your value may be more tied to your hard skills and/or specific subject area expertise. As you rise, though, it is more about your ability to lead, inspire, and collaborate with other people.
Harnessing Emotions and Building Soft Skills
Although stereotypes say that women have naturally stronger soft skills than men, some women may not naturally excel in these areas and need to build them, just as they would learn any new skill.
An important piece of building your soft skills is learning to appropriately express your emotions. Leadership coach Natacha Catalino works with leaders to develop their soft skills, and the journey of learning them has been much of her own life’s work. At the age of eight, she began attending an old-fashioned boarding school in the United Kingdom. She says it was the kind of place where students thrived by appearing strong; those who showed signs of weakness were often bullied. It was a tough environment, and from a young age Natacha learned to put up a veneer and suppress her true emotions. Doing so appeared to serve her well throughout her education, but that all changed as she entered the workforce.
Like most people, Natacha faced challenges at work, but she didn’t have the tools to properly manage or express her emotions. She says it was a muscle she had never used, and she found herself crying in the bathroom and even tearing up in meetings when her suppressed emotions bubbled up at the most inconvenient times.
Through her leadership training, Natacha began to understand that emotions can be harnessed instead of suppressed and ignored. She learned how to name what she was feeling, identify the sensations that those emotions created in her body, and then express that emotion constructively. Over time, she was able to manage her emotions so they no longer controlled her.
For example, say Natacha received a stressful email right before going into an unrelated meeting. Before developing the necessary awareness to harness her emotions, she would have likely brought the frustration or fear she was feeling as a result of that email with her to the meeting. It would affect how she performed and engaged with the people around her, even though it had nothing to do with them.
With greater awareness, Natacha is able to read such an email, pause, and notice: My heart is racing. I am feeling really anxious. Then she takes a few deep breaths to calm her nervous system before heading into the meeting. This approach doesn’t solve the problem, of course, but it helps release the grip that her emotions have on her. She is able to be present and engaged during the meeting without any unrelated emotions bubbling up.
Julie explains this same principle a bit differently. She encourages women to recognize their power and the fact that moods and energy are incredibly contagious. When women leaders express negative emotions, their teams may feel the urge to take care of them, which can diminish performance. Julie encourages everyone, and particularly women leaders, to be responsible for the energy they bring into every room.
Although there is clearly a double standard against women showing emotion at work, the truth is that learning to harness and manage your emotions is a powerful leadership skill. The stereotype of an overly emotional woman is someone who does not take responsibility for her energy or have control of her emotions. It is frustrating that women are told they have to moderate their emotions. But the truth is that when we learn to harness them and take responsibility for our energy in a positive way, we become more effective and powerful leaders—the kind that will be in even greater demand in the future.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from THE BROKEN RUNG: When the Career Ladder Breaks for Women–and How They Can Succeed in Spite of It by Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee, and María del Mar Martínez. Copyright 2025 McKinsey & Company, Inc. United States. All rights reserved.