The Hard Evidence on Soft Skills

˙ PREAL Blog

This post is also available in: Spanish

In December, Professor James J. Heckman gave a lecture at the World Bank in Washington, DC, entitled “Hard Evidence on Soft Skills”, in which he asserted that an emphasis on hard skills (such as knowledge in math, science and reading) at the expense of soft skills (such as character and personality traits) has unfortunate implications for education policy.

Heckman, a Nobel Laureate economist from the University of Chicago, claimed that soft skills are often interpreted as being “fuzzy” concepts that are difficult to quantify, and under this assumption, researchers and policymakers place little attention on the role of character or personality traits in predicting success in life. In fact, however, psychologists and economists have reached significant consensus on defining the most important soft skills and have developed accurate tools for measuring them.

The most commonly accepted set of soft skills associated with success is known as the Big Five Factors, which employs the acronym OCEAN:

  • Openness
  • Conscientiousness
  • Extraversion
  • Agreeableness
  • Neuroticism (or level of aberrant psychological behavior)

Professor Heckman showed that tests measuring these factors are better predictors of college GPA than tests of hard skills like the SAT. They also more accurately predict whether a person will graduate college by age 30, be a daily smoker at age 18, be a teenage single mother, or even be in jail by age 30.

“We have a growing body of evidence that shows that these factors matter, they predict, and the good news is they can be improved,” Professor Heckman states in an online video from his website. He argues that success in life requires more than academic achievement and that education policy should focus more on developing soft skills from an early age. Although interventions that promote character are relatively unexplored, in many cases they play a greater role in determining outcomes than cognitive skills.

Although PREAL has followed the trend and emphasized the importance of hard skills such as cognitive achievement, we believe that Heckman’s argument merits attention. We recommend that you visit Heckman’s webpage for more information, or view a short video entitled “The Hard Facts Behind Soft Skills” for a brief overview of his research. We also recommend the following documents on the importance of improving soft skills in early years, by Heckman and others:

Scott Odell contributed to this article. 


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