codient

Social skills are the difference between a career that stalls and one that takes off — and most people never deliberately learn them. Think about the last time you got a promotion, landed a deal, or made a connection that changed something. Chances are, it wasn't your spreadsheet skills that made it happen. Here's the number that stopped me when I first read it. According to a landmark study by Harvard economist David Deming, workers who combine social skills with technical skills earn 26% more in wages than those who have technical skills alone. Not 2%. Not 5%. Twenty-six percent. Over a career, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars. And here's the flip side: between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring heavy social interaction grew by 12 percentage points as a share of the entire U.S. labor force. Meanwhile, purely technical jobs — the ones where you put your head down and code in silence — shrank. The market has spoken. People who can actually work with people win. ...