In surveys, employers routinely say they value teamwork, collaboration, and communication as essential but hard-to-find traits in young job applicants. Now comes proof that they’re putting their money where their survey answers are. In a new working paper that traces connections between earnings and skills over time, HGSE economist David Deming has found that the labor market is increasingly rewarding social skills — even over the kind of cognitive skills that we often think of as being particularly valuable in an era of big data and expanding technology.

Since 1980, Deming finds, jobs that require a high degree of social skills — consulting, project management, and positions in fields like medicine, dentistry, and the law — have experienced greater employment and wage growth at all levels, relative to other jobs.

Cognitive skills are valuable, Deming concludes, but not in isolation. Jobs that require high levels of both cognitive skills and social skills have seen the highest levels of employment and wage growth over that time period. But employment has fallen in occupations that draw solely on cognitive skills — for people like actuaries, statisticians, chemical technicians, and machinists, all with high math but low social skill requirements.

http://www.gse.harvard.edu/new...payoff-people-skills