What do blue-collar workers have to gain from soft skills? A lot!

Think about your own workplace. A conflict that wasn’t handled well. A must-do that didn’t quite get done. Or even something small like a lost email. The responses to all of these matter. They can have an incredible impact on our experience of going to work.

Communication, problem-solving, time management, leadership qualities among others are always necessary professional skills. The difficulty is that it is more obvious when the people around us lack these soft skills than when they exhibit them. And when it comes to the high-pressure, high-stakes environment of labor-intensive industries, soft skills can be an important prism to understand existing inequities and how to solve them.