To Thrive in an AI-Powered Workplace, Embrace Your Human Skills
Anyone who’s worried about AI taking their job might consider this good news: employers want your uniquely human behaviors. As reported yesterday in HR Drive:
Employers are increasingly focused on soft skills during the job hunt, with 60% saying soft skills are more important today than five years ago, according to a June 9 report from TestGorilla.
More than 70% of employers said evaluating the whole candidate — both skills, personality and cultural fit — leads to better results. In fact, 78% said they hired a candidate with strong technical skills who didn’t perform well because of a lack of soft skills or cultural fit.
So what are soft skills? According to Andrew McCaskill, a career expert at LinkedIn, before answering that question, reframe it. In an interview with CNBC in April 2025, he said, “We do the skills a disservice by calling them ‘soft’ skills. These human-centric skills are really game changers as it relates to how we think about the skills you’re going to need and work on a regular basis.”
McCaskill noted that seven out of 10 of the “skills on the rise” in demand on the employment platform are human-centric skills. Here’s how LinkedIn defined those top ten skills on the rise:
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AI literacy — “the ability to understand and utilize tools harnessing that technology for business purposes.”
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Conflict mitigation — “navigating workplace conflicts is critical to fostering collaboration and leading agile teams”
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Adaptability — practicing continuous learning and resiliency in the face of changing conditions
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Process optimization — demonstrating a knack for “operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness,” especially for frequently in-flux industries
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Innovative thinking — creative problem-solving is one area that cannot be easily replicated via AI
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Public speaking — being able to effectively communicate your ideas to relevant stakeholders
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Solution-based selling — being able to connect customers to “tailored, AI-driven solutions that meet their specific needs”
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Customer engagement and support — “fostering authentic relationships with customers and remaining responsive to their needs.”
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Stakeholder management — “identifying and engaging the right stakeholders and balancing their priorities effectively'”
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LLM development and application — being able to “build and work with the systems that power the technology”
The TestGorilla study results also reported that a lack of soft skills actually hurts the overall organization; 75% of the people it surveyed admitted that they had hired a candidate with strong technical qualifications who subsequently underperformed owing to their lack of human-centric skills.
Like other facets of knowledge management, the challenge of human-centric skills is that they cannot be easily routinized, replicated and automated at scale. However, humans shouldn’t get too smug. We live in a world where productive and healthy employee experience has been successfully translated from “I lucked out with my boss” to “this platform can help with everything from building better communication habits to encouraging down time.”
Human-centric skills work well right now because their positive outcomes are linked to people being present, attentive, responsive, adaptive and contextually-aware of what is needed and when. It’s only a matter of time before all of our creative ingenuity figures out how to parley those skills to another workplace platform — and one can only hope the in-demand adaptability listed above serves us human workers well as we figure out what’s next.