Soft skills for business success

This report by Deloitte Access Economics for DeakinCo aims to assess the importance of obtaining and measuring soft skills to better understand areas that need to be improved in the Australian workforce and businesses. This was achieved by consulting with key industry experts and analysing new detailed data from job matching tools, LinkedIn and Workible, to assess both international and domestic demand for these skills and how well positioned Australians are to provide them. The forecast is that soft-skill intensive occupations will account for two-thirds of all jobs by 2030, compared to half of all jobs in 2000. The number of jobs in soft-skill intensive occupations is expected to grow at 2.5 times the rate of jobs in other occupations.

Overall, the evidence available suggests that Australia performs relatively well on measures of key soft skills (self management, professional ethics, digital literacy, teamwork, critical thinking, communication, innovation, emotional judgement, problem solving). Nine in every 10 employers think their graduates have the capacity for teamwork and the ability to understand different viewpoints. However, there appears to be a gap between demand and supply with a quarter of entry-level employers reporting difficulty filling vacancies because applicants lack employability skills.

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