Soft Skills Training and Healthcare Professionals
The demand for Soft Skills across sectors and companies has grown exponentially in the last decade (Lepeley & Albornoz, 2013, Massaro et al., 2013, Lepeley, 2017). Soft Skills are such an essential component of Human Centered Management that this book, which is part of the Human Centered Trilogy, is exclusively dedicated to the analysis of Soft Skills (Lepeley et al., 2021). Today, companies search for applicants with creativity, adaptability, persuasion, collaboration and Emotional Intelligence (Massaro et al., 2013, Cinque, 2016; Ng, 2020). These Soft Skills replicate a person's behavior and ways of thinking, unlike hard skills which are acquired through experience and practice.
The training of a healthcare professionals (doctors, nurses, assistants and others) includes Soft Skills throughout their career, but especially for those in clinical practice (Farmer, 2015; Vijayalakshmi, 2016). The process of acquiring Soft Skills is embedded mostly in the person's own personality and attitudes such as empathy, assertiveness, extroversion and experiences acquired in practice (death, compassion and affection) (Bordoni et al., 2019). It seems clear that AI, especially the so-called Socially Assistive Robotics, has advanced significantly with important developments in voice recognition and emission, facial expressions of robots, control techniques and intelligence (Umbrico et ai, 2020). As a result, social robots can live with people thereby performing tasks that affect their way of life and wellbeing.
Robots are beginning to imitate human and animal behavior, including motor skills, emotional and cognitive features, communicating with people at different levels of sensory, motor, emotional and cognitive recognition (Clark et al, 2019).
Technology versus Humanization in Care
The report Global Talent Trends 2019 published by Linkedln social network (Aguado et al., 2019) highlights the growing importance of Soft Skills or those skills that machines will never be able compete against and which are the most valuable assets for people and business success today.
Creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability and time management are some of the Soft Skills traditionally most appreciated by recruiters, yet today companies' hiring strategies are focusing on identifying and implementing methodologies that enhance the value of these Soft Skills (Lepeley et al., 2021, Lepeley, 2017, Cinque, 2016, Lepeley & Albornoz, 2013, Massaro et al., 2013). The increase of automation and AI has shown the need to prioritize Soft Skills in addition to cognitive, hard or technical skills in successful hiring (Young, 2018). However, the report states that 57 percent of companies find difficult to evaluate Soft Skills (Young, 2018) mostly due to lack of formal assessment and structured procedures.
