Redesigning the Up-skilling Game in the genAI Era

Although communicative and relational skills are in great demand by organizations, we are not good at identifying, measuring, selecting, and developing these skills with precision.

Soft Skills: How to See, Measure, and Build the Skills that Make Us Uniquely Human, published by De Gruyter, analyzes the role of large language models in automating human tasks and redesigning the workflow of higher education teaching and learning. It tackles the distinction between human and machine-replicable skills. 

The author, Mihnea Moldoveanu, wants to change the game of soft skills with language, models, frameworks, and tools. The idea is to identify and describe these abilities, measure the degree to which a person has them, select those who have them, and find ways of helping students and executives develop them.

We need a ‘re-set’ in how we think about human skills, mainly those skills that cannot be subcontracted to an algorithm running on silicon. The book’s goal is to provide that re-set.

Mihnea Moldoveanu is the founder and academic director of the Rotman School’s Self Development Lab and Leadership Development Lab, recognized for pioneering feedback-based and AI-assisted methods for helping students and executives learn skills that are not easily teachable.