How to measure soft skills in the workplace

Transversal skills, including problem solving, critical thinking, communication and collaboration, are not vague or unmeasurable. The challenge is that most organisations use assessment approaches designed for personality traits, not learnable capabilities.

"We need people with better soft skills." This statement appears constantly in organisational development plans, performance reviews, and hiring criteria. Yet when pressed to define what "better soft skills" actually means, or to describe how current capability could be measured, most organisations struggle.

The label itself creates the problem. "Soft skills" implies these capabilities are subjective and resistant to objective evaluation, fundamentally different from technical skills. This assumption is false, and acting on it is costly.

Why "soft skills" is the wrong frame

Before addressing measurement, the terminology matters. "Soft skills" is problematic for reasons that go beyond semantics. The label implies these capabilities are less important than technical ones. In reality, problem solving, critical thinking, and collaboration increasingly determine professional effectiveness as automation handles more routine tasks. It lumps together fundamentally different types of capability: personality traits, behavioural patterns, and learnable competencies. And it suggests these capabilities are inherently unmeasurable, which prevents organisations from implementing effective assessment at all.

Better terminology: transversal skills, defined as capabilities that transfer across roles, functions, and contexts regardless of technical domain. Problem solving applies in marketing, operations, engineering, and finance. Communication matters in every professional context. The OECD, European Commission, and Jobs and Skills Australia all identify transversal skills as core workforce capabilities that enable people to adapt and contribute as work evolves.

This framing shift matters because it changes how we approach assessment. Personality traits may be stable and difficult to change, but transversal skills are learnable competencies that can be measured, developed, and tracked over time.

Why most soft skills assessment fails

Traditional approaches to assessing soft skills share a common flaw: they produce results too vague to enable development. Personality assessments such as Myers-Briggs or DISC categorise people into types based on preferences and tendencies. These reveal how someone naturally approaches situations, but they do not measure capability. Knowing someone is an introvert or a "challenger" tells you about style, not skill. You can be any personality type and be exceptional at problem solving, or poor at it.

Generic skill ratings have a different limitation. Asking managers to score employees on "problem solving" or "critical thinking" using a five-point scale suffers from subjectivity (different raters apply different standards), vagueness (what specifically is being rated?) and a lack of actionability. A score of 2.8 out of 5 provides no guidance about what to develop or how.

Most assessment frameworks also treat capabilities as monolithic traits rather than systems of distinct competencies applied across multiple phases. Effective problem solving is not a single skill. It is a sequence of competencies: defining problems clearly, analysing root causes, generating solutions, making decisions, implementing effectively, learning from outcomes, and capturing knowledge for others. Assessing "problem solving" as a whole hides the variation within it. Someone might excel at analysis and struggle with implementation. Aggregate scores make this invisible.

 

Transversal skills like problem solving are observable in practice. The challenge is measuring them systematically rather than relying on subjective impression.

 

What makes transversal skills measurable

Transversal skills become measurable when assessment moves from vague trait labels to specific, observable competencies at defined proficiency levels. This requires four things working together.

First, specificity. Rather than assessing "problem solving," evaluate the distinct competencies that comprise it: problem identification, root cause analysis, stakeholder analysis, creative ideation, decision-making, action planning, change management, and knowledge capture, among others. Each is discrete, observable, and developable.

Second, observable behaviours. For each competency, define what effective application looks like in practice. Problem identification, for example, involves writing clear problem statements before discussing solutions, distinguishing what is happening from what should be happening, and identifying when a presenting problem is a symptom of a deeper issue. These behaviours are observable. You can see whether someone applies them or does not.

Third, proficiency levels. Rather than binary capable or not capable, assessment should reflect development stages. Foundation-level capability involves limited or inconsistent application, relying primarily on intuition. Proficient capability involves systematic application across diverse and complex contexts, including the ability to teach others. Levels between these reflect the genuine continuum of skill development.

Fourth, a framework that reflects how the capability is actually applied. Educator and philosopher John Dewey introduced systematic approaches to problem solving as early as 1910, and mathematician George Polya's four-step framework, published in How to Solve It in 1945, remains influential in problem-solving education. The seven-phase framework that underpins the Edaith Systematic Problem-Solving Capability Profile builds on this lineage, organising 21 distinct competencies across the phases of Define, Analyse, Devise, Decide, Implement, Improve, and Document.

From measurement to development

The value of granular capability profiling is the specificity it produces. A generic result tells someone their problem-solving capability is average and suggests they take a course. A granular profile tells them that root cause analysis is strong, creative ideation is above the proficient threshold, but stakeholder analysis and change management are priority development areas. That pattern reflects a common combination of analytical strength and implementation difficulty when multiple stakeholders are involved.

The second result enables targeted development. It identifies which competencies to focus on, at what proficiency level to pitch development activities, and what improvement looks like. This is the difference between general skills training and capability development that actually changes how people work.

For individual professionals, a capability profile clarifies personal strengths to leverage in current work, specific development priorities where focused effort creates the greatest impact, and pattern-level insight about how capability strengths and gaps interact.

A useful starting point before formal profiling is to reflect on recent projects using the seven phases as a guide. Did you invest time defining the problem before moving to solutions? Did you investigate root causes rather than address what was most visible? Did you measure whether the solution actually worked? Consistent patterns across these questions tend to reveal more than any single answer. They identify which phases you naturally skip, and which competencies feel effortful or unfamiliar — precisely the information a formal profile will quantify and build on.

At team level, aggregated results reveal something individual profiles cannot: collective patterns. A team where everyone is strong at analysis but weak at implementation will face different challenges from a team with the opposite profile. Mapping collective capability enables targeted development programmes, more deliberate work allocation, and a shared language for problem-solving practice across the group. Critically, baseline profiling followed by remapping after a development initiative provides something most organisations lack: objective evidence that capability changed, rather than simply that training was delivered.

The Systematic Problem-Solving Capability Profile

The Systematic Problem-Solving Capability Profile evaluates all 17 competencies across the complete seven-phase cycle. It takes approximately 15 minutes to complete, and the resulting personalised PDF report is delivered within minutes. The report includes a phase-by-phase capability profile, identification of problem-solving style from seven distinct patterns, and development actions calibrated to each individual's current proficiency level. These are specific, achievable next steps for each competency, not generic recommendations.

Unlike personality assessments, it measures what people can do and develop, not fixed traits. Unlike generic skill surveys, it provides the specificity required to direct development effort. Unlike theoretical frameworks, it translates research into practical actions people can take immediately.

Getting started

Transversal skills are not unmeasurable. Problem solving, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration are systematic capabilities that can be assessed accurately using appropriate frameworks. The question is whether your organisation will measure them deliberately and use that measurement to direct development, or continue relying on subjective impressions and aggregate ratings that tell everyone the same vague thing.

The Systematic Problem-Solving Capability Profile is available for individuals at edaith.com. Volume pricing applies for teams of five or more. For team and organisational implementation, including aggregated team reporting, contact Edaith.