Coping with Industry 5.0: An Assessment of Evolving Soft Skills for the Workplace

It has been suggested that the transition to the sustainable, resilient, and human-centered production of Industry 5.0 will require a new or enhanced set of soft skills for the workplace, an appealing suggestion but one with only incipient evidence. Meanwhile, major practitioner reports, policy documents, and scholarly work emphasize a need for soft skills, and employers increasingly signal their desire for candidates to possess them. In this chapter, we examine the drivers of a need for more soft skills, and the challenges in research and practice to supporting their acquisition. We identify widespread misconceptions about soft skills, which could ultimately limit their potential for supporting individual and societal well-being. We review the term’s history and foundation, which reveals a number of inherent challenges related to defining, recognizing, and evaluating soft skills. We then illustrate how these can be acknowledged and even embraced through an example of soft skill training from our own work. Finally, we discuss implications for researchers and practitioners.