Tech leaders bemoan the lack of specific hard skills across industries. I would counter this and say there’s a lack of soft skills/leadership ability which helps scale talent and improves their performance.

Retaining and growing employees is more important than constantly looking for tech people. Technical knowledge is becoming a commodity. Companies like Salesforce openly share their secret sauce with online training.

It’s much harder to cultivate soft skills like grit, communication, collaboration, and self-management. I volunteer with a nonprofit called Build.org which cultivates these ‘spark’ skills in its youth participants. People skills are much harder to pick up later in life. Most technical roles are becoming customer-facing. Not enough engineers have been trained to handle customers. Plenty of non-engineers have scaled into tech roles because their leadership enabled them.

Nonetheless, your hard skills will open doors faster than soft skills. The soft skills will take you farther in your career.