How To Make Hard Skills & Soft Skills Training Work

Train the right way for the right skill

After experiencing a sharp pain in the knee during a recent tennis session, it was clearly time to start shopping for a knee brace to stabilize the old patella. A quick search on Amazon revealed a mass of options, from simple compression sleeves to military-grade hinged robo-legs. However, what caught our attention was one brace that advertised, “One-size-fits-all.”

That merited a further look. After all, there are a lot of different body types out there, with a lot of different legs supporting them. If there was a single brace that could handle all of them, then that was the plutonium-level brace of all time.

However, when you looked at the detailed description, you found it was “one-size-fits-most.” Reading further, you were warned to make sure this particular model fits you. In other words, this brace was not really very different than any other brace. It was one size fits some.

Soft Versus Hard Skills

And there are all kinds of ways to divide learners into the various “some” categories. You can have new learners and experienced learners. You can have in-person and remote learners. You can also have informational learning versus mastery learning … and so on.

However, one of the biggest divisions is right in front of learning professionals, yet it is typically not treated as such—soft skills versus hard skills. You will see training covering both topics mixed in together, taught the same way, supported the same way, and followed up the same way.

In many organizations, training is anticipatory learning. You send someone to “Introductory Excel” class to learn the software. You go to “Basics of Selling” before getting a territory. You attend “New Manager’s Class I” before taking over a team. The idea is that you are going to learn all this stuff, and then remember it, so that when an applicable situation comes up you will know.

Unfortunately, this tends to not work, since what people learn in training decays over time if it is not used immediately, reinforced by management, refreshed in review, and rewarded when applied properly.

As a result, what has evolved is essentially the YouTube strategy of learning. If you want to know how to do something, most likely a hard skill, you look it up online. Then, you find the right how-to video, and you watch it and follow along. Once the task is over, you promptly forget what you learned. After all, if you need to do it again, you can look it up again.

When a hard skill task is repeated often enough, employees experience unconscious learning. This is where they have made no special effort to learn something, it just found its way into their memory through repetition—much like you remember TV commercials without trying to.

This is great for hard skills or processes, but it does not work like that for soft skills. First, soft skills are applied in real-time. You can not stop in the middle of a heated conversation and say, “Hold on a sec, I want to review a conflict management video on how to do a softening rebuttal”.

Second, soft skills are not so much “say this, do that” as they are “here’s the philosophy or strategy for handling situations like these.” There is only one way to install a solid-state hard drive on a motherboard. However, there might be a myriad of effective ways to successfully interact with someone when they are upset.

And third, hard skills can often be developed with self-study. If you have enough basic skills to duplicate what you are seeing someone do on screen, then you will be successful at your task. You are doing this on your own.

Soft skills, on the other hand, typically require involving someone else. It is rare for a person to have enough emotional intelligence self-awareness and self-control to make behavioral changes by themselves. You need a coach, a guide, or even a peer learner to provide the kind of outside perspective that is often needed.

Plus, with soft skills, you are not going to master something through repeatedly being exposed to the original training until it becomes second nature. With soft skills, you have to first “get it” in terms of the behavior required. Then you have to start applying it, adapting it, and making it your own.

So what does all this mean to the learning professional?

Recommendations

For hard skills, it means that your training deliverable has to take on two roles—initial learning and refresh/performance support re-learning. A good YouTube video does both well. However, if your initial learning product is a lengthy, screen-flipping, embedded testing extravaganze, then it is totally unsuited to being used as performance support.

You will need to create quick how-to versions of content without all the unnecessary instructional design flourishes. It is all about the accessibility of information. Employees want to find out how to do something, and then get back to work. Give them the information the way they want it.

For soft skills, it is a bit more complicated—especially in a remote learning environment. The key question is how you are going to provide the other person with what is required.

One way is to create a new class of training programs. For every “How to do [soft skill #43]” program you offer, you can also offer a quick “How to coach and reinforce [soft skill #43]” program for supervisors. Because if the supervisors are not reinforcing the training, you can be sure the learners will not be applying it for very long.

Another way might be to set up a subject matter expert hotline where remote learners can talk to a trainer and get their questions answered or receive some coaching tips after the learning event, whether online or in person.

Another way might be to foster the connection of learners on specific topics, such as providing moderated comments areas for each program, where learners can make connections on their own, post questions and answers, and learn from each other.

The point is, if you are to make soft skills training work, you have to also provide the personal touch required to help learners truly change their behaviors.

Summary

Back to the knee brace analogy. It would be much easier if there truly was one size that fits all. You could buy that device instead of having to select from hundreds of options. Yet that is not how it works.

And that is not how it works with soft versus hard skills development either. You can not single-track both types of training—especially not today. They are simply too different.

Hard skills are perfect for unconscious learning. However, it takes conscious learning for soft skills. And it takes more of a support system after the learning event to make sure that soft skills are developed, applied, and reinforced.

Do it right, and you will not need any more knee braces.

Ken Cooper is the Founder of CooperComm, Inc., a training and consulting firm specializing in effective e-learning development and video technology. He has conducted over 2,500 seminars, appeared on satellite TV for Anheuser-Busch and Apple, and has created over 1,000 video-based online training programs. Ken is the co-author of Taming the Terrible Too’s of Training and The Control Catastrophe, and the author of Effective Competency Modeling & Reporting, The Relational Enterprise, BodyBusiness, and Stop It Now.  Visit www.KenCooper.com  Connect Ken Cooper