Month/Year of Graduation

5-2026

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science (B.S.)

Department

Neuroscience

First Advisor

Lynn Harland

Abstract

Soft skills are defined as any non-technical ability related to how you do your work. While hard skills are commonly thought of first when it comes to job responsibilities, soft skills are increasingly important to the success of any role. Soft skills can be broken into the broad categories of cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal skills. The goal of this study was to define the soft skill profiles of different industries and compare the similarities and differences across industries. To do this, an interview and survey were conducted including employees from a variety of industries. The interviews compared the IT and public service industry and focused on qualitative information, while the survey compared the IT, business, and management industries and focused on quantitative information. The results found little differences between the IT and business or IT and public service industries; however, large differences were observed between management level roles and frontline roles in each industry. Additionally, no major differences were observed between the categories of soft skills between industries, but there was a small increase in the mean cognitive skills score for the IT industry compared to the business industry. These insights provide interesting directions for future research, including developing clearer definitions of soft skills in action, exploring the concept of soft skills as team-based rather than individual-based, and studying the effectiveness of promoting successful frontline workers to managers as opposed to creating a separate pipeline for managers.

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reviewed and passed for accessibility

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