The Surprising Military Origins of 'Soft Skills'
- Jul 10
- 5 min read
Colby is an empathy researcher, organisational development practitioner and entrepreneur at the intersection of leadership, culture and human systems. At Cognitive Humanity, she leads strategy, product thinking and the development of tools that help organisations measure and strengthen human capacity at scale.
Walk into any HR department, scroll through any LinkedIn post about professional development, or sit through any career coaching session, and you will hear the same refrain: soft skills matter. You can even scroll through our articles or browse our website, and you will see it there too. Actually, what you will see is that we think skills such as communication, empathy, and adaptability are anything but soft.
“Soft skills” is a serious misnomer
In fact, the more we use the term, the more the word “soft” bothers me. We are consistently told that these skills are important, undervalued, and increasingly what separates good employees from great ones.
Yet “soft” has an entirely different connotation. The term suggests something that is nice to have rather than an essential set of skills that matters just as much as practical, hard skills.
While reading Adam Grant’s book, Hidden Potential, I came across his discussion of how the term “soft skills” came into use, and its history surprised me.
The term was not invented by a career coach, a management consultant, or a business school professor. The United States Army played a major role in formalising the distinction while developing training systems that separated broader human and organisational capabilities from skills involving machinery, such as gun handling, something that never came up in my master’s coursework in industrial and organisational psychology.
Machines, people, and the problem of training
In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the U.S. Army was investing heavily in what we might now call evidence-based training, drawing on lessons from World War II and responding to the pressures of the Cold War. The Army wanted to move away from intuition and tradition and towards something more systematic, a rigorous, engineerable approach to turning civilians into effective soldiers.
In 1968, the U.S. Continental Army Command, known as CONARC, formally introduced a training doctrine called “Systems Engineering of Training.” The idea was straightforward: break down every job in the Army into its component skills, determine how to teach those skills efficiently, and measure how well soldiers had learned them.
It worked beautifully for skills involving machines. Teaching someone to operate a tank, fly a helicopter, or field strip a rifle fit neatly into a systems engineering framework. These were concrete, measurable, and observable actions. You either hit the target or you did not. The gun either jammed or it fired. Every skill and action had clear outcomes and clear feedback.
But Army leaders were confronting something that did not fit neatly into the model. Units with similar technical training could produce very different outcomes in the field. The difference was not always marksmanship or mechanical aptitude. It could be leadership, cohesion, how soldiers communicated under stress, how they motivated one another, and how a sergeant could read a room and make decisions that no training manual explicitly covered.
These were critically important capabilities, but the Army’s systems model did not yet offer an adequate framework for teaching, measuring, or even discussing them.
Naming the unnamed
The solution was, characteristically and bureaucratically, to hold a conference. In December 1972, CONARC convened a two day Soft Skills Training Conference at the U.S. Army Air Defense School in Fort Bliss, Texas. Researchers, trainers, and military officials gathered to grapple with a fundamental question: How do you systematise the training of skills that resist systematisation?
Dr. Paul Whitmore, a key figure at the conference, offered what became a foundational working definition. He described soft skills as important job-related skills that involve little or no interaction with machines and whose application on the job is broadly generalised.
That was the working definition. It did not define soft skills solely as interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, or résumé building. Instead, it referred broadly to important skills that did not centre on operating machinery.
The counterpart, hard skills, referred primarily to skills that did involve machines. The distinction was material, not a judgment about difficulty or importance.
There was even debate over whether map reading counted as a hard or soft skill because maps were made of paper rather than machines.
A phrase that outlived its definition
What is even more fascinating is that, even as the Army was formalising the term, conference participants were sceptical of the distinction. The 1972 conference formally recommended that the terms be deemphasised or discontinued because they were ambiguous and potentially misleading.
The recommendation did not prevent the phrase from spreading. Over the following decades, “soft skills” migrated into business schools, HR departments, and self-help books. Along the way, its meaning shifted substantially. What had been a technical distinction became a loaded value judgment.
The irony is profound. The Army was not dismissing soft skills. It was trying to take them more seriously and find ways to rigorously develop and assess capabilities recognised as crucial to military effectiveness.
The rebrand that has not stuck
For decades, critics have argued that the term “soft skills” does these capabilities a disservice.
Proposed alternatives have proliferated: people skills, human skills, power skills, core skills, essential skills, transferable skills, interpersonal skills, and emotional intelligence. And I will say it, Capacities of a Thriving Workplace, the framework we created.
Seth Godin has argued that these should be called “real skills” rather than soft skills. Language shapes perception, and perception shapes investment.
What the history actually tells us
There is something clarifying about knowing how the Army used and formalised this phrase. More than fifty years ago, it recognised that the skills most resistant to a checklist were often among the skills most responsible for success or failure.
It saw the importance of communication, trust, leadership, and cohesion in environments where technical competence alone was not enough.
What the Army classified as soft skills, we might more honestly call human skills or capacities. They are the things machines cannot do, algorithms struggle to replicate, and no amount of technical training alone can replace. The Army understood this by 1972. Most of us are still catching up.
The full proceedings of the 1972 CONARC Soft Skills Training Conference are available as a scanned document, a record running 329 pages that captures the moment the Army formally examined and attempted to define something that had always been there.
Start the conversation
Perhaps it is time we retired the phrase “soft skills” altogether. If language shapes how we value human capability, choosing better language is more than semantics. It influences where organisations invest, what leaders measure, and how we prepare people for the future of work.
At Cognitive Humanity, we believe these are not soft skills. They are measurable human capacities that underpin trust, collaboration, decision making, leadership, and performance. And they are too important to keep describing as optional.
Read more from Colby Jones
Colby Jones, Empathy Researcher and Human Capacity Strategist
Colby Jones is an empathy researcher, Colby is an empathy researcher, organisational development practitioner and entrepreneur at the intersection of leadership, culture and human systems. Her background blends organisational psychology, empathy research and practical experience in building brands, products and teams. She is particularly focused on how data about human experiences, stress, trust and relational patterns can be used to ethically support better decisions for both people and organisations.
