Soft Skills, Outsourcing and Working Until You Drop

I’ve been on the road for the past week, so my apologies for being away from the blog during that time. Here are some interesting surveys that came across my desk while I was gone.

Soft skills rock: A recent poll of hiring managers by OfficeTeam, HR.com and the International Association of Administrative Professionals says that 67 percent of hiring managers say they would hire an applicant with strong “soft” skills even if their technical skills were lacking. However, only 9 percent say they would hire someone with strong tech skills but weak interpersonal skills. In addition, 93 percent of hiring managers felt that technical skills are easier to teach than soft skills. The point—and it’s true of everyone in the workforce, from administrative staff up to high-level executives—is that the ability to work collaboratively trumps all else. Technical skills are nice, but they don’t do much good if you can’t work with others.

Outsourcing still an issue: Global outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas note that there is a growing trend toward greater outsourcing of work in the financial services industry. Writing about the recently announced merger between European banking giants ABN AMRO and Barclays, John Challenger says that “in addition to the 12,800 jobs the combined banks plan to eliminate, the banks announced that 10,800 [jobs] would be ‘moved offshore to low-cost locations.’ This comes just two weeks after Citigroup announced it would be eliminating 17,000 jobs and outsourcing an additional 9,500 jobs to low-cost locations inside and outside of the United States.” He adds: “The issue of outsourcing has fallen off the national radar over the last couple of years. … However, as the recent banking announcements prove, outsourcing is still a significant tool among corporations seeking to cut costs.”

A sobering prospect: Need another indicator that the gloom-and-doom talk of huge worker shortages is just overblown rhetoric? A survey by Bankrate.com says that nearly one in five workers “plan to work until death.” Wonder why that is? Well, the poll also found that 28 percent of those surveyed save less than 5 percent of their gross pay a year. This includes 16 percent of Americans who acknowledge that “they are not putting any of their paycheck aside for retirement.” If you ever questioned the need for automatically putting employees into 401(k) plans and other self-funded retirement vehicles, this poll should cure you of that.