"Soft Skills" is a Terrible Name for the Most Important Skills You Have

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In this episode of WTF is Business Casual?!, Jenny and Sarah get real about why "soft skills" is a garbage term for the most critical thing missing from your workforce right now. Armed with a Harvard Business Review study of 70 million job transitions, they make the case that collaboration, communication, and problem-solving aren't the floor. They're the ceiling raiser. 

And yet companies keep hiring, promoting, and paying for the wrong thing.

Whether you're a small business owner, a people manager, or just someone who's been on hold with a chatbot for forty-five minutes, you'll leave with:

• ✅ Why technical skills have a half-life of under two years, and what actually holds its value
• 💡 The real reason managers keep getting promoted into roles they can't handle
• 😂 A Wendy's AI drive-through that has customers ready to commit crimes
• ✅ One practical thing you can do this week to start building human skills in your organization

Highlights:

 [00:00] Cold open: foundational skills beat specialists long-term
[01:02] "Soft skills" is a bad name. Let's call them human skills
[03:24] The HBR study: 70M job transitions, one big finding
[04:51] Technical skill alone destroys culture
[05:19] Internships vs. real-world people skills
[10:23] The half-life of technical skills is shrinking fast
[12:20] AI does the technical stuff — then what?
[13:19] What happens when a manager reads an AI script to an employee
[16:09] Why organizations invest in the wrong training
[18:46] Promoted for technical skills, unequipped to lead
[19:11] Gen Z, COVID, and why we're failing them
[23:51] Job postings: collaboration language up, supervision language down
[26:40] Why Jenny and Sarah's first product flopped (and why that matters)
[27:09] The coffee shop owner who threw her barista under the bus
[31:45] Engineering humans out of human resources
[32:14] The Airbnb nightmare — no human, no resolution
[38:45] Wendy's AI drive-through and the rage it's about to unleash
[41:03] Tactical takeaway: pick one human skill and define it

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