Working at a beer plant taught me about hard skills and soft skills.
I’ll quickly describe one of the demands of that job. After separating from their respective cardboard packs, returned beer bottles would travel upright to the bottle washer before being recycled. Should one of the bottles fall over, my job was to stand it up again. This task lasted three hours, then I moved to the next work station.
That summer my father called it “invaluable work experience.”
Seth Godin famously said, “If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it.” At the time of that quote, Godin was describing giving your job to someone younger, at a different company, or in a different country. If hard skills could be taught to you, they could be outsourced to anyone. I was the someone younger at the beer plant.
Why hard skills are no longer enough
Today, if hard skills can be programmed, they’re being automated.
I’ve written previously that truck drivers will be the first to lose their jobs to machine learning. Their hard skills, defined by their drivers licenses, require basic human attention and reactivity. By transferring those skills to automated machines, performance can be tweaked until operator error eventually gets to zero.
Without hard skills, a truck driver adds no value.
On the opposite side of the job market, a radiologist requires 13 years of training. Top grades in medical school, plus a residency. These doctors diagnose injury and disease by analyzing X-rays, MRIs and CT scans. Their skills are literally the hardest skills. And they’re paid accordingly: the average radiologist salary in the United States is $426,590 per year.
Reported in the scientific journal Scientific American, a team at M.I.T. trained a computer program to analyze the mammograms from 32,000 women. Collating that data, it was then tasked to predict the cancer rate within a small test group. The algorithm was significantly more accurate at predicting cancer than standard clinical practices by Radiologists.
A.I. algorithms not only spot details too subtle for the human eye to see. They can also develop entirely new ways of interpreting medical images, sometimes in ways humans do not understand.
Scientific American, 1 February 2020
Without hard skills, a radiologist adds no value.
Future-proof your career with soft skills
Now imagine that same doctor, instead of being trained with exclusively hard skills, was trained as a medic. She’d have to apply critical thinking, empathy and instinct to a job that required more from her than the right answer. Her job wouldn’t demand a knockout punch, it would need her to duck and weave.
How about the truck driver? Instead of merely getting from A to B, what if he sold ice cream out of his truck? What people skills would he need to grow that business? Or keep customers? His job would expect more of him; driving would be the means to a different end.
If hard skills are getting programmed to perfection, it’s the randomness of soft skills that are keeping jobs safe. The more you can add varied, situational challenges to your job, the more secure your job will be. Human responses might be emotional and messy, but we’re at our best when the correct answer is just beyond our reach.
Back to me. By mid-summer all of the student workers were laid off at the beer plant, and I wound up earning less than if I had stayed at my previous gig: head lifeguard at an outdoor, inner-city pool.
What kind of skills do you think that job demanded?