4-minute read - by Kate Brunton, May 3, 2018
Think you can get away with merely having great ‘hard’ skills in a technical job? Think again. The evidence is adding up: soft skills are becoming increasingly important in the workplace. Thanks to accelerating technology, tasks that require hard skills are declining, making soft skills key differentiators for job candidates.
Oxbridge Academy, a South Africa-based online college even goes so far as to claim that hard skills are useless without soft skills. “While [technical skills] are the skills you’ll list on your CV, today’s employers seek more than this,” they explain. Another article relates, “It won’t matter how well you understand CSS or can fix a pipe if no one can relate to you.”
In a 2017 report, Deloitte Access Economics predicted 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.” They cited technology, globalization, and demographic shifts that will change how businesses compete as reasons for this increase.
Soft skills are especially crucial in customer service departments, which companies are beginning to focus on more as customers become increasingly demanding.
Service vs. support
‘Customer service’ at ASML is not what the term typically brings to mind: call centers, item return forms, and drop-down menus with frequently asked questions. It’s proactive support. Ever since ASML produced and sold its first computer-chipmaking machine (the PAS 2000 stepper) in 1984, it’s never simply been about ‘making it work’ – it’s been about making it work at the customer location. For this we need a proactive customer support department.
James Cowden, our Netherlands-based senior recruiter for Customer Support, explains why this department is so important at ASML. “If one of our machines stops working for a single minute, it costs our customers such as Samsung, TSMC and Intel thousands of euros. It’s mind-boggling. Our customers have to spend potentially billions of euros to create a factory from scratch that houses lithography machines. So that’s why they want to keep the machines churning 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, otherwise they risk losing money on their investment. You can see why they get upset when a machine’s not working.”
