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There are no longer the soft skills of yesteryear: the evolution of skills in the digital age

Soft skills are transforming in the digital environment, requiring integration with technological skills to cope with contemporary complexity

9 September 2025

4' min read

"Sorry, but that DM of yours triggered me."

It means that your direct message - on Whatsapp, or Instagram, or Teams... - triggered a strong emotional reaction in me, because of a communication that I perceived as aggressive, or ambiguous, or not respectful of my sensibilities. The questionable verb 'to trigger' - with derivatives such as 'trigger warning', the warning that should precede the triggering content... - borrowed from trauma psychology and passed over for the language of social, is now also used in corporate environments.

Here is a first sign of the change taking place: emotional sensitivity has also become an explicit topic of conversation at work, and manifests itself in both digital and physical environments. But not only that. The very ways in which we communicate, collaborate and relate have changed radically. In other words, soft skills are no longer what they once were, not because they are not needed, but because the conditions that make them effective have changed.

The era of integrated skills

We live in a world of very high complexity, where communication takes place by voice messages, writings, GIFs, emoji, where meetings are held remotely and where work is measured in results rather than hours. In this scenario, the old soft skills, born in an analogue and linear context, show their limits. The 'flexibility' of yesteryear - which meant staying an extra hour in the office without protesting - has now become the ability to reschedule one's day in real time, managing personal and professional priorities simultaneously.

In today's digital, distributed, hyper-connected environment, interpersonal skills are not exercised in the abstract. They are exercised within complex technological environments. A manager who does not know how to negotiate on video calls or who does not grasp the emotional tone of a Teams message is as inadequate as an architect who does not know how to use Autocad.

Let's take empathy: today it is no longer enough to 'understand the other person', we have to do it remotely, through the Microsoft Teams interface, Zoom, or an 'emotional CRM' that tells us about a customer's behaviour before we even meet him or her... In fact, we talk about 'digital empathy'. Or consider collaboration: it is no longer 'knowing how to work in a team', but knowing how to work in asynchronous environments, on platforms such as Teams, or Slack, or Jira, perhaps with colleagues who live in different time zones and do not share the same mother tongue.

Soft skills have not become extinct: they have immersed themselves in a technological context that has profoundly changed them. And the term itself, 'soft', risks sounding anachronistic today, if not downright misleading.

The deception of 'humanistic' education

Many companies continue to offer soft skills training with 1990s approaches: corporate theatre, experiential workshops, group dynamics. Nothing wrong with that, except that these approaches alone do not prepare people for what really happens in their daily work.

Because leadership is no longer practised in a meeting room, but often in a WhatsApp group or a Trello board. Because the skill of 'active listening' has to be demonstrated while managing a hybrid team, where maybe half the people work remotely and the other half don't even know what it means, to work remotely.

Effective training today must integrate soft and hard dimensions: we can no longer separate relational skills from digital skills, nor human dynamics from system dynamics.

Il modello di lavoro: ruoli o competenze?

Technology as context

Technology is no longer a medium that 'mediates' or 'conditions' relationships, but has become the grammar within which relationships take place. This also applies to leadership, to internal communication, to change management.

Here are some examples.

AI generative: today's empathetic manager must know how to dialogue with tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini, but also interpret their limitations, contextualise their responses, and use them to construct effective narratives without delegating critical thinking.

People analytics: it is not enough to 'know your employees', especially if there are many of them; you need to be able to read behavioural patterns from data on the use of digital tools, e.g. average time on tasks, engagement on training platforms, feedback collected in real time.

AI and augmented reality in onboarding or support processes: the 'ability to accompany' newcomers or junior colleagues is now also exercised through immersive environments or augmented interfaces. Empathy must also be exercised through the design of effective and engaging digital interfaces.

Towards a new taxonomy of competences

A new map is needed. In some companies, people are already talking about meta-skills: second-level skills, such as the ability to learn in hybrid environments, to adapt, to filter information, to work on oneself to re-learn what one thought was acquired by transporting it and adapting it to digital channels.

What about 'kindness', 'resilience', 'flexibility'? They remain important words, but they are no longer skills in their own right. They are behaviours that are expressed in highly technological contexts and therefore need to be re-engineered.

There are no longer the soft skills of yesteryear because there are no longer the jobs of yesteryear.

The office is no longer a place. The team is no longer a team of people who are physically together. Time is no longer linear.

Those involved in corporate training must accept a new challenge: not to teach people to be 'human', but to restore humanity within digital ecosystems, automated systems and intelligent platforms.

The modern manager does not lead people. He leads people who live and produce within digital environments.

*Responsible for the Digital Academy, Newton S.p.A..