Research Brief - Created: May 2019
Soft Skills. The most important stuff that you weren’t taught.
Soft skills are a combination of people skills, social skills, and communication skills, that enable people to navigate their environment, and achieve their goals all while complementing their hard skills. Your soft skills help define the type of person you are to work with.
Hard skills are specific concrete professional abilities you can either perform or you can’t.
I wanted to highlight an occupational analysis for a marketing specialist. Now whether you’re on Account Management, SEO, PPC or Media team, based on common job titles, this analysis covers most people in the department.
I turned to Burning Glass to explore how many times these skills had been mentioned in job postings for a marketing specialist in the last 12 months. Burning Glass provides us with real-time data on job growth, skills that are in demand, and labor market trends. This tool is part of the research efforts we provide to ASU which helps us look at the bigger picture and tell the full story.
In the analysis we see the most popular specialized and baseline skills for this job within the past 12 months. Here we bring it full circle and see that the bold skills are soft skills we highlighted earlier. These skill make up a day in the life of a marketing specialist - and we were able to create this analysis this with data and tools the research team uses on a daily basis.
The entire deck can be found below.
