At McDonald’s, soft skills are at the heart of what we do. We know that these skills can really affect a customer’s experience with us, and that they are critical to our employees’ performance, progression and motivation.
However we also know that as a nation we are not investing enough in skills such as communication, teamwork and time management, and now we have the stats to back this up:
- By 2020, over half a million UK workers will be significantly held back by a lack of soft skills – an issue forecast to affect all sectors.
- At the same time, soft skills contribute £88 billion to the UK economy today – with this contribution predicted to increase to £109 billion during the next five years.
- 97% of UK employers believe soft skills are important to their current business success, and over half say skills like communication and teamwork are more important than traditional academic results. However, three-quarters believe there is already a soft skills gap in the UK workforce.
- Meanwhile, UK employees say they struggle to sell their soft skills. One in five would not feel confident describing their soft skills to an employer and more than half (54%) have never included soft skills on their CV.
Source: Development Economics Ltd, January 2015 and YouGov Plc, September 2014.
We want to change this.
We’re spending 2015 championing the hard value of soft skills, together with leading organisations from the worlds of business and education, alongside entrepreneur James Caan CBE. We hope not only to change peoples’ perceptions of soft skills, but also to generate some brilliant new ideas about how to develop them in the workforce so that all employees can benefit from them throughout their careers and lives.
To download our research, click on the button below.