- Some business leaders have credited their success to interpersonal skills like communication.
- We asked young professionals on the street in NYC what qualities they attribute their success to.
- Many cited soft skills, including having patience and the ability to speak with different people.
For Warren Buffett, it’s communication. For Mark Zuckerberg, it’s being unafraid to make mistakes. For Tim Cook, it’s collaboration.
When you ask someone what the secret to their success is, there’s hardly a limit to the answers you may get. And yet, those we consider pioneers and leaders in the tech, finance, and business industries almost always respond with soft skills.
Soft skills are more abstract than traditional hard skills like coding or Excel, but an easy way to think of them is that they relate to a person’s ability to work with others.
In October 2023, Business Insider’s Tim Paradis reported that soft skills have become increasingly in demand in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic.
More employees feel less engaged with their jobs, a sentiment that has only grown amid corporate America’s great detachment, the doom-and-gloom of industries-wide layoffs, and the rise of work-from-home culture.
“What we’re developing is a whole generation of people who don’t even know what soft skills mean because they assume the whole world is about the tools that they have,” Norman Bacal, author of “Take Charge: The Skills That Drive Professional Success,” told Paradis.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that by 2029, millennials will outnumber all other generations in the workforce, with more than 38.5 million members.
But the US is already seeing a shift toward a younger workforce. Glassdoor reported in 2023 that Gen Z would likely overtake baby boomers in full-time roles for the first time this year, even making millennials seem like old fogeys in certain industries, BI’s Amanda Hoover reports.
In short, it’s young professionals who’ll be setting the standard of success at work for years to come.
So, with that in mind, BI took to the streets of NYC to ask Gen Zers and millennials what skill they credit their success to. Here’s what they said — and how their answers reflect qualities business leaders also emphasize.
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