Soft and Hard Skills
09 Aug 2026 - Richard Horridge
It is still unclear what shape the new economy will take and what our place will be within it.
Profound uncertainty is nothing new to us – in fact, it is a universal truth. These are still quite big uncertainties to have to grapple with as they relate to our relative worth within our society and the value that that those individuals with higher relative power put on our time and labour.
Being a technical expert has always been difficult. In my varied career I have often been the only one who knows and understands the work that I do, regardless of how much the rest of my organisation gets use and value out of it. This has been the case in small, medium and large organisations.
In the developing new economy I increasingly see the work of technical experts being outsourced to machines. This is nothing new – we, as technical experts, have used machines to make our work easier, faster, and of higher quality since the dawn of man. From steam engines to neural networks, engineers have created machines to handle specific problems and free up their attention for the next challenge.
What is new in the developing new economy is the machine that can "talk" back to us. This is new! No longer do we require a technical expert who can understand the machine. It can deconstruct our plain text input and reconstruct the most likely plain text output (+/- a bit of randomness here and there) that comes next. Rather like ELIZA before it, this new type of machine has captured the imagination of many of those who've used it.
So much of our world can be reduced to plain text, from 1970s COBOL programmes still running our financial and transportation systems to detailed technical specifications in Markdown format.
However, the true challenge has always been the communication of ideas. Those five minute chats with managers on the staircase. Those snatched conversations at the side of team meetings. Those five minute slots at senior manager meetings.
There is an increasing risk that technical experts will be pushed out of organisations which see their work as a commodity and their opinions as a challenge and an irritation. Functioning organisations require there to be robust, psychologically safe dissent within their ranks. The best outcomes will always be a compromise borne out of listening carefully to those with whom you disagree, trying to understand their intentions and coming to common agreement.
I have often struggled with both imposter syndrome and an overinflated sense of my own importance. Most of the time we can have fairly minimal impact on the world around us. We should not be afraid of putting our heads above the parapet and building relationships with those whom we may instinctively disagree. These "soft" skills cannot be outsourced to a machine.
We as technical experts are well placed to help organisations to succeed. In the new economy we must ensure that our voices are heard.
