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.
"Soft skills" has always been a hard sell. Soft sounds optional. Soft sounds like an afterthought.
Durable is a different word entirely. Durable is what survives. Durable is load-bearing. Durable is the thing you build the rest of the structure on top of, precisely because it doesn't crack under pressure.
And that's exactly backwards from how most people rank these things. The technical skills you spent years getting good at? They have a shelf life, and AI is shortening that shelf life every quarter. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs report says as much: the skills that hold their value as AI reshapes work are the human ones [the ones we're now calling durable]: reading a room, adapting when the plan falls apart, listening to understand, communicating clearly and knowing how to work with people, not just systems.
Those used to be the skills nobody put on a resume because they didn't seem like skills at all. Now they're the skills nobody can automate.
I spent sixteen years in the Salesforce ecosystem and frequently I was the least technical person in the room. That used to intimidate me. Everyone around me could speak the language of the system fluently, and I felt like I was always a half-step behind.
What I eventually figured out is that I wasn't behind. I was holding something the technical people in the room weren't.
I could tell who needed to be heard. I listened deeply enough to understand the problem we were trying to solve. I could feel a conversation start to spiral and find the thread that pulled it back together. I could sit in a meeting that felt like it was going nowhere and redirect the group to an actionable discussion.
I was the glue. Turns out glue is durable [and incredibly valuable].
Carrie
Hi! I'm Carrie. I believe doing good work and living the life you want are not in conflict. If you're ready to build that way, reply to this email or see how we can work together.
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