What's the French translation of "soft skills"?

The most accurate translation is "compétences comportementales". You'll also encounter "savoir-être", which is older and more associated with attitude, and "compétences transversales", which is broader and includes transferable technical skills. In everyday professional usage, the English term remains dominant.

How many soft skills are there?

There's no closed list, and published inventories range from a dozen items to several hundred depending on the level of detail. Grouping them into families — relational, cognitive, emotional, organisational — is more useful than looking for an exact number.

How do you identify your own soft skills?

Two practical entry points: what colleagues come to you for, and what you do without being asked. Both reveal behaviours you've stopped noticing because they feel obvious to you. A standardised behavioural assessment adds an outside view where self-assessment is unreliable.

Which soft skills should go on a CV?

None as a list of adjectives. "Rigorous, autonomous, good communicator" says nothing, because every candidate writes the same thing. What works is demonstrating them in the experience section: a situation, an action, a result.

Are soft skills more important than hard skills?

The question is poorly framed — both are necessary and they don't serve the same function. What the research shows is that hiring processes assess hard skills well and soft skills badly, while failures happen almost entirely on the second side. The imbalance is in the assessment, not in the importance.

Soft Skills: Definition, Examples and Complete List

Soft skills are the behavioural competencies that determine how a person works: how they communicate, how much autonomy they need, how they handle pressure, how they collaborate and adapt. Where hard skills describe what someone knows how to do, soft skills describe how they do it.

What are soft skills?

They're the behaviours that determine how someone works, as opposed to the technical knowledge that determines what they can do. They aren't learned from a manual and they almost never appear on a CV — which explains a great deal about why they're assessed so badly.

A few concrete examples to anchor it. Saying you don't understand something. Rephrasing before answering. Meeting a deadline without being reminded. Flagging a problem before it becomes blocking. Taking criticism without justifying yourself.

None of those five things appears in a job description. All of them determine whether a working relationship functions.

Why is the English term used even in French?

Because the French translation exists but never caught on. The official equivalents are compétences comportementales and savoir-être — both accurate, both perceived as institutional HR vocabulary.

The result shows up in search behaviour: French speakers search the English term far more than its translation, and they also search soft skills en français and soft skills traduction. The word travels faster than its definition.

The terms you'll encounter, and what they mean

Soft skills — the dominant usage, including in professional French.
Compétences comportementales — the most accurate translation, used in official frameworks and competency models.
Savoir-être — older, more associated with attitude and bearing than with competence.
Compétences transversales — broader: includes soft skills but also technical skills transferable between roles.

What's the difference between soft skills and hard skills?

Hard skills describe what a person knows how to do. Soft skills describe how they do it. Both are learnable; only one reliably appears on a CV.

Hard skills

A programming language, management accounting, proficiency in a specific tool, a foreign language, a certification. They're measurable, provable by a qualification or a test, and closable through training.

Soft skills

How someone communicates, decides under uncertainty, responds to disagreement, organises their work without supervision. They're observable in situation, difficult to measure, and they shift through feedback rather than instruction.

Why the distinction matters in hiring

Because selection processes are built to assess hard skills — CVs, technical tests, competency interviews — while failures happen almost entirely on the other side.

In a Leadership IQ study tracking 20,000 hires across 312 organisations, 89% of failures were attributed to behaviour rather than technical skill. Technical competence itself accounted for just 11% of the causes.

Source: Leadership IQ, Why New Hires Fail. Worth noting: Leadership IQ is a private consultancy rather than a peer-reviewed journal — treat the figure as a strong directional signal, not a precise measurement.

So companies hire on one side and part ways on the other. That's the paradox that makes the subject worth taking seriously.

What are some examples of soft skills?

There are dozens, and lists of fifty items are more decorative than useful. Grouping them into families makes the set workable.

Relational skills

Communication — conveying information clearly, in writing and in conversation.
Active listening — understanding what's being said before responding, including what isn't said explicitly.
Collaboration — working with people whose methods aren't yours.
Assertiveness — expressing disagreement without aggression and without going silent.
Conflict management — addressing tension before it turns into a blockage.

Cognitive skills

Problem solving — breaking a complex situation into workable parts.
Critical thinking — evaluating information before accepting it.
Creativity — producing a solution that wasn't among the available options.
Learning ability — acquiring quickly what you don't yet know.
Prioritisation — separating the urgent from the important when everything looks urgent.

Emotional skills

Emotional intelligence — recognising and managing your emotions and other people's.
Stress management — keeping your decision-making intact under pressure.
Resilience — recovering from a setback without losing engagement.
Empathy — understanding someone's position without necessarily sharing it.
Self-awareness — knowing your limits, and knowing them before others do.

Organisational skills

Autonomy — making progress without being told how.
Reliability — doing what you said you'd do, by when you said you'd do it.
Time management — estimating how long a task will actually take.
Adaptability — changing method when the context changes.
Initiative — acting without waiting for an instruction.

Which soft skills are most in demand?

The honest answer depends on the role and the team, which is why generic rankings are worth so little. But there is serious data on which behaviours weigh most in performance evaluation.

In a study published in Work, 253 experts — researchers, managers, HR professionals and occupational health specialists — selected the most important indicators of individual work performance. The behaviours most frequently retained:

Resilience — maintaining effectiveness under pressure or adversity: selected by 70% of experts
Showing responsibility — committing to tasks and obligations: 67%
Creative solutions to novel, difficult problems — 66%
Keeping job knowledge up to date — 57%
Taking initiative — acting without being prompted: 51%
Accepting and learning from feedback — 48%
Dealing with uncertainty — acting effectively in ambiguous situations: 48%

Source: Koopmans et al. (2014), Work 48(2), TNO-VU University Amsterdam. Peer-reviewed. The percentages show the proportion of the 253 experts who selected each indicator among the most important in its dimension.

The same study establishes that behavioural dimensions account for 63% of the weight attributed to individual work performance — against 36% for task performance itself.

A caveat on that figure

It's an expert weighting exercise, not a predictive correlation. These practitioners were asked what they weigh when evaluating an employee, not what statistically predicts output. What makes the result compelling is who answered: people who evaluate employees every week.

Why demand is rising

This isn't an impression. The wage premium associated with soft skills doubled between 1968 and 1990 in the US labour market.

Source: Bacolod & Blum (2008).

Another indication, from a sector where you'd expect the opposite: asked what most affects project complexity, 74.5% of aerospace project practitioners point to human and behavioural factors — against 21.3% for process and 8.5% for the product itself.

Source: Azim et al. (2010), International Journal of Managing Projects in Business 3(3). Small sample (n=47), single sector.

Can soft skills be learned?

Yes, but not the way technical skills are learned. They shift through feedback and repetition in real situations rather than through instruction — and some shift far more readily than others.

What moves reasonably fast

Communication habits, how work gets structured, time management, the willingness to ask for help. These are practices: they change when practised differently, provided there's feedback on what isn't working.

What moves slowly

Tolerance for ambiguity, the relationship to conflict, the need for control, natural decision-making pace. Not immutable, but not corrected by a quarter of training either.

Why that matters at the point of hiring

Because not everything can be fixed afterwards. A technical gap closes through training. A mismatch on working pace or on the relationship to autonomy, almost never — and that's precisely the kind of mismatch that causes missions to fail.

Hence the case for assessing it beforehand rather than discovering it in month six.

How do you assess soft skills?

Through a structured process: the same questions in the same order for every candidate, scored against a grid defined in advance, alongside a standardised behavioural assessment. Free-flowing conversation is the one method the research consistently finds unreliable — it mostly measures comfort in interviews.

That's a subject in its own right, which we cover in detail in How to Assess Soft Skills Before You Hire.

What to take away

Soft skills aren't a nice-to-have bolted onto technical competence. They're the behaviours that determine whether technical competence produces anything.

Three points, if you keep only those:

Hard skills describe what a person can do, soft skills describe how they do it. Hiring processes assess the first side and fail on the second.
Behavioural dimensions account for roughly 63% of the weight attributed to individual performance, according to a published expert consensus.
They're learnable, but unevenly. Which is the reason to assess them at hiring rather than discover them mid-mission.

Assess behaviour, not just the CV

Migbirds evaluates soft skills, motivation and behavioural fit to anticipate whether a person and a mission will actually work together. Before the placement, not after it.

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