Podcast 4: New Soft Skills Research Revealed

Hosts Dr. Tobin Porterfield and Bob Graham share some cutting-edge
research on soft skills we obtained from a survey of almost 500
business people. They further dig into results among various
groups, including people seeking jobs, workers without leadership
roles, mid-level managers, executives, and the self-employed. It’s
great stuff that will give you new insights on soft skills.
Bob Graham ‘0:00’: Coming up, we will share some cutting-edge
research on soft skills we obtained from a survey of almost 500
business people. It’s great stuff that will give you new insights
into how soft skills are really being used in the workplace. That
and more in just a few seconds.    
Graham ‘0:28’: Welcome to Episode 4 of Serious Soft Skills. I am
Bob Graham, and with me, as always,  is Dr. Tobin Porterfield.
We each teach college, we collaborate on researching soft skills,
and we both have used and seen others use soft skills in various
jobs over our careers. We think our experience and expertise give
us a unique lens for looking at soft skills.
Graham ‘0:59’: So today, Toby, we are going to do things a little
differently. We’re going to talk about some research we have done
in the field of soft skills that we have only released to a list of
very few people. So this is breaking news. If I had a glass, I
would break it. This is big stuff.
Why This Research Matters
Graham ‘1:29’: Before we get into the research, Toby, why don’t you
set up for people what the research found. Of course, whenever you
are looking at research, the first question is who did you ask the
questions to? Can you walk through how we got this data we are
about to share?
Dr. Tobin Porterfield ‘1:45’: Bob, I am going to throw you a curve
ball because I think we need to actually take a step further back
because one of the problems with research is you have to cover why.
Otherwise, you can look at all these results and people say, “Who
cares?” Let me frame it up with why we even got into this and why
we reached out to our network for some answers. It started with us
looking around. As we were developing that sensitivity to soft
skills, we’d have observations. We’d say that we had seen
leadership do this and I see the importance of communication. We
usually refer to these as anecdotal or experiential evidence. We
get these little snippets. They almost turn into sound bites that
you might hear on the news. We’ve even seen this in news clippings.
We start to pull all these pieces together, but as people who look
at research, we have to stop and say, “Hold it. Is that really a
unique experience I have had and it doesn’t apply to anyone else,
anywhere else?” That is what brought us to doing the survey and
reaching out to our network to ask the question and validate that
soft skills are really important, which soft skills are important,
and who are they important for.
Porterfield ‘3:06’: Our initial survey did that and it cleared up a
lot of items and it brought some focus in. It also motivated us to
say this kind of work needs to be done. Back to the survey. Bob,
can you give us a little background on how we reached out to
collect that data?
How We Found Participants
Graham ‘3:24’: We went new school, I would say. In the past you
would try to find people to do surveys by mail or by fax, and I can
remember doing some surveys that way. But here, we actually used
some new stuff called social media and email. We leveraged
LinkedIn. We used databases we each have of LinkedIn connections.
Those connections we sent an email to asking them to fill out a
short survey. It took less than five minutes. It wasn’t real long
and involved. We also posted it on social media, on our Facebook
pages, on LinkedIn and on Twitter. We got really good response
there. And we did some networking, one of the soft skills. I sent
it out to a few people in my network, who were kind enough to share
with their networks...

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