Soft skills are getting a rebrand. They're calling them durable skills now, and I have feelings about it.
I've spent my whole career making the case for these skills, under their more boring name, soft skills. People spend their time and money sharpening their technical skills. Soft skills? Not so much. I left my one and only full time job in the tech industry because the company could not figure out where I fit, even though I was telling them, loudly and repeatedly, exactly where I needed to sit. There was a box for technical skills, and since what I brought didn't live in it, nobody knew what to do with me.
So when a friend told me last week that "soft skills" are becoming "durable skills," my first reaction was something like, oh cool, a new name. Because if we just call them something different, people will finally take them seriously. Right?
But I sat with it for a few days, and I've landed somewhere different. I want people to understand what these skills are and what they do. If a new name gets us there, I'm in. Rebrand away. Let's do this.