AIM Soft Skills Survey 2019 – AIM

soft skills

AIM’s Softskills Survey 2019 Report analyses Australian business leaders’ opinions towards the importance of soft skills in their organisations, the most important soft skills, soft skills development plans and methods.

Some main insights from this report include:

  • Most of the business leaders in Australia trust that soft skills will become very or extremely crucial to businesses in the next few years.
  • Communication, leadership, emotional intelligence, people management and problem-solving are ranked as the most important soft skills for organisations. However, despite the importance of these skills, only 18.9% of Australian businesses provide emotional intelligence training and just 17.8% of them provide training for problem-solving.
  • 58% of Australian executives hope to have a stronger communication skill in their organisation and 81% of them claimed that this is also the most crucial skill they search for in new hires. It is likely that more than 66% of organisations will provide communication training to their staff in 2019. Non-HR executives value communication skills more highly compared to HR executives.
  • While HR leaders would like to focus more on team-related skills like leadership and collaboration, non-HR leaders would prefer to concentrate on individual skills such as problem-solving or critical thinking.
  • 40% of business leaders in Australia wish for better leadership within their companies, but this skill is more highly regarded by  HR leaders than non-HR leaders. Half of them will consider this skill as important when hiring new employees. Leadership is also the soft skill that will be in most business’s development agenda for 2019.
  • It is estimated that 43.6% of Australian businesses will spend averagely less than $500 per employee on developing their soft skills, although 30.1% of them reported setting aside a more than $2,000 per capita budget for L&D.
  • The most important soft skills for new hires are identified by business leaders as communication, problem-solving, collaboration, adaptability and emotional intelligence.
  • More than half of business executives believed that an employee’s desire to learn is the best method to developed soft skills, followed by tailored training, feedback and experience. More than half of the leaders said that individual training is more preferable compared to organisation-wide training.

Full report here.