May 14, 2025 – Continuous learning and soft skill development are increasingly vital as technological advancements and evolving job roles demand adaptability, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence. Successfully navigating instability and change requires strong soft skills like interpersonal skills and adaptability, according to Beth Nastachowski, leader of TI Verbatim Consulting’s training and development team. “These soft skills enable leaders and employees to productively integrate changes in the workplace, pivot when strategy needs to change, and use new technology like generative AI to increase their productivity and the quality of their work,” she said. Without these skills, organizations, leaders, and employees will flounder.”
In the coming years, Ms. Nastachowski explained that all industries and organizations will be impacted by global macro changes like generative AI, increased cost of living, climate change, and shifting workforce demographics—it’ll be impossible to maintain the status quo and still remain competitive and relevant.
“Soft skills and continuous learning will be what makes the difference, allowing leaders and employees to successfully navigate the impact of these macro changes in their organizations and industries,” she said. “The leaders and employees who best embrace and integrate analytical and creative thinking, adaptability, active listening, cultural humility, emotional intelligence, transparent communication, and inclusive leadership will be more likely to thrive; those that don’t may find themselves overwhelmed by these macro changes and less competitive and relevant in the marketplace.”
One of the challenges with integrating new technology is that implementation of the new system, platform, or tool can be rushed or poorly rolled out, Ms. Nastachowski noted. She said that leaders “may be so focused on the new technology’s potential once it’s fully integrated that they lose sight of how the workforce adopts and adapts to the change. This is a classic change management issue that organizations experience all the time, but it will become even more relevant as technological advancement accelerates.”
For example, one organization Ms. Nastachowski recently worked with implemented a major update to their client caseload system, providing a much-needed upgrade. The organization’s workforce recognized the need for the updated system, but there wasn’t enough stakeholder involvement or ongoing training and support after implementation. As a result, employees were still using workarounds for the system two years later, and complaints about the system and its impact on the workforce came up in every training cohort she engaged with.
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“If leaders aren’t careful about how they integrate new technology, workers can become burnt out navigating change, wasting time and money and losing out on potential increases to efficiency, quality, and productivity,” Ms. Nastachowski said.
Consultants continue to say that for employees and leaders, developing soft skills will be essential in any industry or organization. When Ms. Nastachowski thinks about the most effective leaders she has trained or the colleagues she has found most productive to work with, it’s their ability to communicate, collaborate, motivate, actively listen, and be self-aware that made the most impact.
Beth Nastachowski leads TIVC’s training and development team, developing leadership training programs that create durable skills for participants and long-lasting cultural change for organizations. Throughout her career, she has implemented innovative strategies to engage participants in active, sticky skill development. Ms. Nastachowski has created the learning ecosystem approach for TIVC’s training, resulting in training programs with a full suite of training and training supports for participants, resulting in long-term skill development and learning transfer. Her perspective on training is informed by her years of experience working with thousands of adult learners in higher education. She is dedicated to integrating universal design, accessibility, and DEI into her curriculum development.
”These are the types of skills that will be relevant long term, across industries and jobs, and they’re actually the skills that will enable you to upskill and fill gaps in technical skills as well,” Ms. Nastachowski said. “A good example of this is the increasing integration of generative AI in the workplace. While knowing how to prompt Chat GPT is a useful technical skill, it’s also a moving target. Just in the last six months, how I’ve written prompts for Chat GPT has changed immensely with updates to the model. However, the soft skills I use on a daily basis have remained constant. Technology and technical skills will continue to evolve, but the people we work with will always be just that—people who we can work most productively with using soft skills.”
The World Economic Forum’s recent Future of Jobs Report 2025 clearly and explicitly identified soft skills as the most important critical skills for the future workforce; the top 5 skills employees need are all soft skills: analytical thinking; resilience, flexibility, and agility; leadership and social influence; creative thinking; and motivation and self-awareness.
“It’s important to recognize that these were the skills identified as essential across industries and job functions, so they really will be critical across the workforce,” said Ms. Nastachowski. “Many of the ways we can integrate these soft skills into learning and training environments have already been a part of how we educate students and train workers. Formal educational institutions should continue to shift away from memorization and lecture as the primary goal of and form of teaching.”
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“Asking students to complete assignments that involve creativity, strategic thinking, writing, and problem solving develops skills they will need in the future,” Ms. Nastachowski said. “There’s also a reason why many students don’t like group work—it relies on interpersonal skills and collaboration that can be frustrating and feel unrelated to the assignment itself. But really, group work is a crash course in working as a team and in using soft skills. For this reason, activities like group work are one of the most directly applicable way to prepare students for the workplace.”
In turn, workplaces should build on these skills by emphasizing how soft skills are used in employees’ daily work and by prioritizing these skills in the organization’s culture, according to Ms. Nastachowski. “Soft skills are integral to a productive, inclusive culture,” she said. “So, while organizational leaders may ask me to work with their team to improve quality or client satisfaction, the skills I’ll engage participants with during training are how soft skills can foster that improved quality or client satisfaction. Many employees have the foundation or start of soft skills but can struggle to see how they can use them productively in their role, so I also focus on how soft skills can be used to achieve outcomes that are often framed as more technical. Your boss wants your team to meet a tight deadline? I’ll show you how soft skills can increase your team’s cohesion and collaboration, amplifying the technical skills you already have and allowing you to meet that goal.”
Ms. Nastachowski noted that a good example of this is the ability to provide constructive and productive feedback. “Let’s say there’s a team that isn’t meeting their productivity goals for resolving client cases,” she said. “Rather than focusing on training employees on the workflow for client cases—or, at least, not focusing solely on this workflow—we can foster managers’ ability to provide constructive feedback, enabling the team to improve. Similarly, we can train the team in how to provide constructive feedback to their peers to foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement. This focus on the soft skill of providing constructive feedback increases the team’s productivity.”
Technical skills are often what gets someone into an industry or gets them a job, Ms. Nastachowski explained. “Soft skills are what helps someone get promoted or fosters success in an industry,” she continued. “Employers want someone who can not only do the technical side of a job—code a website, create a branding campaign, write a grant—but someone who can also solve problems collaboratively and pivot with change. These soft skills help employees thrive at an organization, not just get by.”
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Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief and Dale M. Zupsansky, Executive Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
