Soft skills Soft skills Soft skills are a combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, character of personality traits, attitudes, career attribute, social intelligence and emotional intelligence quotients among others that enable people to navigate their environment, work well with others, perform well, and achieve their goals with complementing hard skills. The Collins English Dictionary defines the term "soft skills" as "desirable qualities for certain forms of employment that do not depend on acquired knowledge: they include common sense, the ability to deal with people, and a positive flexible attitude." Since 1959, the U.S. Army has been investing a considerable amount
Emotional intelligence has incremental validity over IQ and the Big Five personality traits. The term "emotional intelligence" seems first to have appeared in a 1964 paper by Michael Beldoch, and in the 1966 paper by B. Leuner entitled "Emotional intelligence and emancipation" which appeared in the psychotherapeutic journal: "Practice of child psychology and child psychiatry". In 1983, Howard Gardner's "Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences" introduced the idea that traditional types of intelligence, such as IQ, fail to fully explain cognitive ability. He introduced the idea of multiple intelligences which included both "interpersonal intelligence" (the capacity to understand the intentions,