“Soft” skills might be helpful for members of supply chains to have, but more and more employers and managers of supply chains are recognizing the need for “hard” skills. The industry of supply chains is changing rapidly, and employees with the hard skills to function effectively are needed to keep pace. Managers of supply chains need to know what skills to look for in new employees in order to keep their business relevant.

Benefits and Limitations of Soft Skills

Soft skills are skills of motivation, passion, creativity, innovation and the like. These skills may seem like wonderful qualities to look for in people, and they are, but having soft skills will not make an employee able to do a job he lacks the knowledge to do. Soft skills complement hard skills, and are largely useless without them.

 

A person with creativity will always be able to dream up new ways of doing things, but a person who has only creative skill and no hard skill may create more problems than benefits. Lacking hard skills, he may overlook potential problems or fail to see barriers to implementation of his new idea. A person with creative skill and hard skills in the area he is working in will be able to understand more aspects of what he is working to create and will be better able to foresee and solve problems.

 

Motivation is an amazing thing for a person to have. Working 14-hour days to solve problems or implement new ideas is sometimes necessary in any business, but motivation alone accomplishes little. A worker abounding in motivation, but lacking in hard skills for his work, may work 14 hours straight but achieve very little.

 

Most soft skills cannot truly be taught, they are qualities a person either possesses or does not. However, some soft skills in the areas of communication and leadership can be taught or enhanced. Being able to communicate effectively is a soft skill that is important for everyone to possess to a greater or lesser degree, but thankfully it is one that can usually be taught to a person who lacks it.

 

Motivation, creativity, passion, effective communication and other soft skills are useful for employees (and managers) to have, but they are not as essential as hard skills. Think of soft skills as supplementing the usefulness of hard skills, and you will have a good understanding of the relationship between the two types of skills.

Hard and Necessary Skills

Alright, so what are “hard” skills? Hard skills are the skills a person needs to actually do work. They are training, knowledge and technical skills. Hard skills are largely the ones you go to school for or are learned through experience.

 

Hard skills include the understanding of specific areas of knowledge. The area of knowledge can be anything from cost accounting or business ethics to programming languages or how to drive a forklift. All of these, and any other areas of skilled knowledge (barring the few soft skills that can be taught) a person learns are hard skills.

 

Specific hard skills that a supply chain needs will vary with the specifics of the supply chain’s business area, but may include:

• Computing skills
• Mathematical understanding
• Materials science
• Digital learning
• Robotics
• Project management (in supply chain managers)
• Understanding financial statements (in supply chain managers)

When a person has both the hard skills necessary to do work and the soft skills to complement them, magic can happen. Creativity plus understanding leads to surprising advancements. Motivation plus technical proficiency accomplishes large tasks quickly. Leadership plus project management creates teams that work together effectively.

Software is Changing the Chain

Advancements in technology are changing the hard skills supply chain managers need to look for in employees. Various changes in software are effecting supply chains, and workers with skills in software are needed for supply chains to stay competitive.

 

More and more of the supply chain is becoming automated, and while this may mean fewer employees are needed overall, employees with specific hard skills in the area of automation will be critical. Highly trained technicians with the hard skills to create, repair or improve automation systems are becoming essential to modern manufacturing.

 

Not just the supply chain, but what the supply chain provides is being affected by software advancements. For instance, vehicles are incorporating more software into their systems. The Ford Hybrid Fusion has some 10 million lines of code in its computerized brain and those codes process around 25 gigabytes of data every hour. Employees with the hard skills to understand the higher levels of technology in what the supply chain is supplying are necessary.

 

Finding people that marry the necessary hard skills with supplementary soft skills is challenging, but to succeed as a supply chain (or any other business) the right employees are essential. Taking the time to find employees with the relatively new hard skills in computing, automation and other related areas is a necessary step in the changing face of manufacturing and supply.