What Are Hard Skills And Soft Skills- How Do They Show Up In Education?

Have you found yourself searching how to help students master skills that aren’t necessarily in your teaching curriculum? For example, “how to help students ask better questions?” or “tips for teaching creativity”. If this is you, that means you are looking for help in teaching the soft skills. But what are hard skills and soft skills? Can you teach one without the other?

Keep reading for some thoughts on these very normal, poignant questions!

Be sure to download Project-Based Learning and Soft Skills: The Complete Guide for free.

What are Hard Skills?

Hard skills are skills or abilities that are technical and generally easy to measure. These skills are specific to certain jobs. For example:

Coding
Foreign language skills
Cooking
Software development
Driving

When it comes to education, hard skills are those that you are most likely to evaluate on a test. In math, hard skills would be being able to ass, subtract, divide and multiply numbers. In English Language Arts, hard skills include applying grammar rules to written sentences.

What are soft skills?

Soft skills are also known as people or interpersonal skills. They are skills or abilities that are not as easy to measure. Some examples include:

Communication
Leadership
Critical Thinking
Teamwork
Time Management

One of my favourite Ted Talks is the one shown below that explains this exact topic.

You can find the video down below!

While they are not tested on ministry or state exams, they are just as, if not more important to education as the competencies that are graded on exams. Many believe that in order for children to be successful in their future careers, they must first and foremost have a breadth of hard skills. However, that is not necessarily true. According to a survey conducted by The Society of Human Resource Management, 89% of employees who fail within the first 18 months on the job are because of a lack of soft skills.

So how do we teach both?

Teaching both does not need to be done completely separately. It is possible to teach them in tandem with one another.

The first step is to be aware of what the soft skills are. When going through the standards you are required to teach, think about which soft skills would lend themselves to the hard skills you already know you have to teach.

Click here to check out the Soft Skill Complete Guide.

You may choose to focus on one to two each week or month.

For example, perhaps I would spend a month focusing on critical thinking when it comes to finding reliable sources. When teaching a grammar lesson, I would model a grammar rule with quotes from different newspaper articles. This would not only help demonstrate a grammar rule but could lead to a discussion about bias and whether the article includes any bias from the writer.