LinkedIn Data: Soft Skills Tied to Faster Promotions

Hard skills, as the name suggests, tend to be concrete, tangible, and technical: Think tax preparation, graphic design, or language proficiency. They’re relatively easy to define and straightforward to assess. 

Soft skills, on the other hand, can often feel squishy, slippery, and generic — how do you define problem-solving or accurately evaluate someone’s organizational skills? 

Yet as nebulous as soft skills can seem, we know they’re incredibly important for building successful careers, workforces, and organizations. 

New LinkedIn data reveals some hard stats on the value of soft skills: People with them get promoted faster than those who don’t.

Compared with members who exclusively listed hard skills on their profiles, those with both hard and soft skills got promoted 8% faster. A similar analysis done earlier revealed this trend is even more pronounced among technology pros, a group of workers typically tied to hard skills in the popular imagination. 

It’s a testament to the concrete impact of so-called soft skills: Even if you can’t easily measure the skill itself, they still make a measurable difference. 

For talent professionals, that’s a good reminder that these soft skills should be a serious part of your hiring criteria. It’s also a call to action for companies to help employees develop these particular skills — in fact, “in-person softs skills training will increase” was one of our five predictions for learning and development in 2024. 

Now let’s take a closer look at which specific soft skills lead to faster promotions. 

Which soft skills make the biggest impact? 

While having any soft skill is associated with 8% faster promotions, certain skills have an outsize impact.

Organization, teamwork, problem solving, and communication skills were all individually linked to 11% faster promotions, when compared with those members without any soft skills, while leadership led to 10% faster promotions. 

Updating your skills regularly also linked to sooner promotions

Though soft skills clearly punch above their weight, new LinkedIn data also shows that developing hard or soft skills regularly is associated with faster promotions. 

Members who updated their skills on a regular basis (multiple times a year) received promotions 11% faster than those who rarely updated their skills. This speaks to the value of continuous learning and instilling a learning culture. (It also emphasizes the importance of keeping your LinkedIn profile up to date!)

Final thoughts

Previously, similar LinkedIn data showed that technology pros with soft skills received faster promotions. Today’s new data affirms that this holds true across all members, not just tech workers. Though soft skills may be harder to quantify than hard skills, it’s important to remember that they can sometimes count for more. 

Methodology

Only full-time employees in the last four years (January 1, 2020, to December 31, 2023) are considered. Career impact examines the aggregated and anonymized data on LinkedIn members who had full-time employment and were promoted in the last four years. Only members who started a job and were promoted internally in the last four years are included. 

The analysis only considers promotions where the seniority increased by either one or two career levels at a time and excludes members who were promoted in less than three months of starting a new job. To understand the impact of adding a soft skill (for example, communication), two sets of members are created: members who have at least one hard skill and communication and members who only have hard skills. The average time to get promoted is then compared for these two sets of members. Only those members who added the skill before the promotion date are included. Skills held by fewer than 40,000 members are excluded from the analysis. 

The frequency of skill updates is determined by calculating the average difference in number of days between the updates. If a member has less than three skill updates in the last four years, they are categorized as “infrequent.” If the average number of days between updates was fewer than 180 days, they are categorized as “quarterly” or more.