The smartest career move you can make is learning to work with people

🍿 You can watch the video version of this essay here

You're sitting in another meeting, mentally rehearsing what you want to say. The right moment passes. Then another. By the time you speak up, someone else has already made your point and everyone's nodding at them. You leave feeling invisible.

The pattern repeats that afternoon where you can't get past the dreaded surface-level networking chat. Again in the evening where you stay up late redoing your direct report’s work because you didn’t know how to phrase feedback so you avoided giving it completely. And again when you watch a coworker less technically skilled than you get promoted. Again.

You’re exhausted. Not from the work itself, but from the constant guesswork of working with people.

So, what’s actually happening here?

We spend years learning what we need to do in our jobs, but not how to work well with people and every interaction becomes something we have to figure out. Meetings become draining. Building relationships feels like a performance. Sharing your ideas becomes daunting. And while we’re busy second-guessing ourselves, we become invisible and miss out on the exact career opportunities we’re trying to work towards. Those opportunities go to people who communicate clearly, build relationships, and adapt with ease.

Then before you know it, you're stuck mid-career with strong technical skills and not much to show for them. Because being good at your job isn't enough anymore.

The smartest career move you can make is learning to work with people.

It's not your fault if you don't know how. No one taught you. These skills, communication, collaboration, relationship building, emotional intelligence, and adaptability, were left for you to figure out on your own. Everyone assumed you'd just pick them up along the way through trial and error, but you need to be taught how to work well with people, just like you were taught how to do your actual job.

Something has changed in the last five years. We have 500 LinkedIn connections but can’t think of anyone to call when we need a new role. We walk past someone’s desk and can’t remember how to start a casual conversation. We communicate through screens, through Slack messages, through carefully worded emails that take 20 minutes to write because we're trying to get the tone just right.

There’s something I try to but just can’t understand. Many of us spend more time with our coworkers than with our family and friends. Seven, eight, nine hours a day, five days a week. And yet, we invest the least effort in learning how to interact with the people we're surrounded by the most.

We'll sit through endless technical training and chase qualifications. But when it comes to the people side of work? We've just left that to chance.

We all know, in theory, what good workplace relationships look like. We understand the need to communicate with clarity and kindness, to have the hard conversations, and to listen (really listen). Yet in practice, the theory fails to change our behaviour. We lose our temper with each other. We respond defensively when our ideas are challenged. We let conflicts fester because we don't know how to address them without making things worse. It doesn’t just affect individuals’ careers. It creates friction across entire teams and organisations too, with the cost showing up in missed deadlines, low morale, high turnover, loneliness, and teams that have the potential to work brilliantly together barely functioning.

Since starting Let's Talk Human Skills, I’ve directly trained over 12,000 employees and collectively they’ve revealed to me what’s really happening behind the scenes.

Now, I see AI both amplifying the need for human skills and giving us a dangerous way to avoid developing them. People are turning to AI to handle the parts of work that feel too difficult. Someone uses it to generate interview questions for candidates. Someone else uses it for networking conversation starters. Another to come up with ideas for a brainstorming session. These are things we should be able to do ourselves. Simple, human things.

But using AI to avoid these interactions makes working with people harder because we’re not practising it. If we always outsource the messy and emotional parts of work to machines, what happens then? We reach a point where no one's really talking to each other. So, where will people learn to listen, to share ideas, to have hard conversations when they matter most? I’m pretty certain that working with people doesn't need to be this hard.

We've always needed human skills. But as technology handles more technical work, these skills aren't just helpful anymore, they're what make you indispensable. The work that remains is precisely the work that requires communication and collaboration and ideation. We need human skills now more than ever, yet instead of developing these skills, we’re using technology to avoid them at the exact moment we can least afford to. We're outsourcing our competitive advantage.

We need to start putting the work into our human skills because the nature of work itself is changing. The days of having one job title at one company for years are disappearing. We're moving towards a workforce where you'll work for multiple companies, applying your skills to different projects, sometimes simultaneously. It's hard to predict what specific roles will exist in 2-5 years, but we do know that your skill stack will matter more than the job titles you've held.

Let’s take design as an example. Today you might be creating designs using your favourite design tool. Tomorrow you're directing AI design tools and making judgement calls on what resonates with users, how to interpret client needs, and which creative direction serves an organisation’s strategy. Going forward, someone who’s able to collaborate, read client needs, and pivot quickly might be better suited than someone with 10 years of technical design skills with weaker human skills.

Your skills are your currency.

They’ll allow you to work across multiple projects and connect with people where it matters.

I've had 16 jobs over 16 years. Often holding down 2-3 at any given time for a number of years. In the early years as an English teacher, Spanish translator, university lecturer, accessibility researcher, working my way from entry level to senior leadership across four different industries.

The lightbulb moment came when I realised that despite the years I'd spent developing technical skills and collecting qualifications, I still wasn't the best at my job. I wasn't the best English teacher, the most talented Spanish translator, the sharpest subtitler, or the most experienced researcher. But the reason I kept getting incredible career opportunities like subtitling Spanish TV shows (including Money Heist and Real Madrid documentaries) and being flown around Europe to present my research at conferences was because I could communicate, collaborate, build relationships, and adapt well.

When I looked around, I noticed the people who were respected and listened to, who got things done and created real impact, and who were offered the best opportunities, they too all had strong human skills.

We've been led to believe that these skills are innate: qualities that you either have or don't have, and if you don't, well, tough luck.

I was lucky enough to find myself in rooms where I needed to practise them. So I started to document everything. I spent the next six years documenting my interactions, what went well, and what didn’t.

Every time I shared an idea in a meeting… How did I deliver it? How did they respond?

Every time I had to address bad behaviour… How did I choose to approach the conversation? What did they say back to me?

Every time I met a new person who I wanted to stay in contact with… How did I follow up? How did we support and celebrate each other? What did the relationship lead to years later?

From documenting how to work well with people it became clear. These incredibly valued, career-transforming skills can be learned, which means they can be taught. The smartest career move you can make is learning to work with people.

When I started looking at how we actually talk about these skills, though, something didn't add up. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the term soft skills. It’s an apt description for these skills because they stretch and mould across different tasks, jobs, careers, and industries, whereas hard skills often can't do that.

Except most professionals lump everything that isn't technical expertise into one category called soft skills with time management, communication, emotional intelligence, organisation, relationship building, all bundled together under one label. They’re not the same thing. For example, a data analyst might struggle to take their expertise and apply it directly to graphic design, but their communication skills stretch across both roles.

Soft skills have two distinct subcategories: operational skills and human skills. Operational skills like time management, organisation, and planning help you to get the work out the door on time. Human skills like communication, collaboration, and emotional intelligence help you to work well with people.

Over time, I can see another subset of skills emerging within human-machine interaction, bridging both hard and soft skills, including articulation, context provision, delegation, judgment, and refinement to help you work effectively with AI and automation.

I see, in many workplaces, that people have strong technical skills and well-practised operational skills, and they’re thinking about the skills needed for human-machine interaction, but what's missing is the final set, the human ones that help people work with people.

If you want career opportunities to keep coming, you need to think carefully about which skills you're building. Are you building a mix of technical, operational, and human skills? And are you keeping track of whether your skills are perishable or durable?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduced this distinction in his book Antifragile. Perishable skills lose their value over time due to advances in technology and changes in society. Learning a specific software package is perishable because it'll eventually be updated or replaced. Durable skills however, withstand change. Communication is durable because it's fundamental to how we interact and build relationships. We’ve always needed communication and always will.

Research from IBM found that the half-life of technical skills is now less than five years, meaning a skill learned today will be half as valuable in five years or less, such as specific programming languages and social media platform algorithms. Moderately perishable skills with a shelf-life of 5-15 years include broader technical competencies like data analysis methods and design principles. Durable skills include communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving. These withstand change and become more valuable during times of change. They last decades.

A person who focuses solely on technical skills becomes a specialist, highly valuable within their niche until that niche disappears. Their skill stack is perishable. When their specialisation becomes disrupted, they have to pivot their entire expertise. But a person with a skill stack built on a foundation of durable human skills, who adds technical skills as and when they’re needed, can adapt as work changes.

How you manage emotions, communicate, collaborate, build relationships, adapt, and connect the dots between ideas can create a unique skill stack. That's your unfair advantage. Looking back, I kept getting career opportunities despite not being the most technically skilled because my skill stack included human skills that made me indispensable. My top three human skills are communication, relationship building and adaptability, which give me a solid base that transfers everywhere. Then, depending on the role I’m in or the project I’m working on, I learn the relevant technical skills.

For example, my 8-year career as a Spanish translator required an advanced level of Spanish language, the ability to apply translation principles, and proficiency with specialised translation and subtitling software. In a decade-long research career, I developed survey design and data analysis skills. In the six years I spent teaching in secondary schools and lecturing at universities, I learned lesson planning and assessment. A few of these technical skills were needed across multiple roles, but not many.

There will be times in your career when you're not the most experienced person in the room. Times when you need to learn new technical skills quickly. If you rely on your technical skills, however, you go into every project needing to learn everything from scratch and work becomes overwhelming.

If you have a foundation of human skills, including the confidence to get started and the adaptability to get up and keep learning, you'll pick up new technical skills quickly and without the stress.

A lifelong learner with strong human skills will always be indispensable. In a world of constant change, that combination gives you something solid to build upon that can’t be automated.

Through 16 years of workplace observation and 6 years of documentation, I identified 53 human skills we need to work well together. To keep it simple, I’ve organised the 53 skills into seven core human skills, each with its own set of subskills.

Let’s take communication as an example.

It includes adapting your style to different audiences, sharing ideas to get buy-in, listening, having difficult conversations, handling conflict, and responding to bad behaviour such as when someone interrupts you.

You might consider yourself a strong communicator overall, but if you haven't developed the ability to have difficult conversations, you'll struggle the moment you need to use it. Your communication ability ebbs and flows depending on which subskills you've built and the situations you encounter. This is true for all seven human skills, your effectiveness changes based on the specific scenario you’re in and whether you’ve developed the subskill required for that situation.

Confidence: The ability to believe in your expertise and take action, plus make other people have confidence in you and your ideas. Without confidence, your ideas stay in your head, your contributions go unnoticed, and opportunities pass you by.

Emotional intelligence: The ability to recognise, understand and manage your emotions, as well as understand the emotions of others. Work is full of emotional complexity, so when you can read the room, adapt without overthinking, and choose how to respond to challenging situations, you will perform better.

Communication: The ability to convey ideas clearly, listen, and adapt your message to different people. Most workplace problems come down to communication failures. When you can express yourself clearly regardless of who you're talking to, and handle difficult conversations without falling apart, you become someone people want to work with.

Collaboration: The ability to work well with others by adapting to different working styles and working through problems in ways that strengthen relationships. Very little work happens in isolation anymore, so when you can do this, you make everyone's job easier, including your own.

Relationship building: The ability to build trust, mutual respect, and support and celebrate others on an ongoing basis. Strong workplace relationships create opportunities, support networks, and make work genuinely enjoyable rather than something to endure.

Ideation: The ability to generate and develop new ideas by connecting the dots between unrelated things. The workplace needs curious, creative, experimental people who can think independently and evaluate ideas critically. When you can bring original thinking to projects and challenges, you become highly valuable.

Adaptability: The ability to take your skills and use them differently as your environment changes. Change is constant in modern workplaces, so being able to adjust to new conditions, roles and expectations means you can stay steady through uncertainty.

I’m often asked about how these skills can be learned.

Each human skill has the same formula and requires you to read your surroundings, process it through your own filter, then work out where you can best contribute. An effective approach to human skills training needs three things:

Whenever I talk about the importance of developing human skills, I hear a common reservation, “This sounds like being nice to everyone, and that's not realistic”.

“You’re right, it’s not”, I say.

Working well with people doesn't mean being nice to people, keeping everyone happy and avoiding conflict at all costs. That's not what this is about at all.

Working well with people means making conscious decisions in your workplace interactions, including treating someone with respect even when you completely disagree with them, actually listening to understand their perspective rather than just waiting for your turn to speak, facing a problem together instead of letting issues accumulate. If you’re a manager, it means giving your team honest feedback that helps them improve even when it's uncomfortable for you to deliver. Or challenging an idea in a meeting because the team needs to hear another viewpoint. Working well with people is often hard and messy, and human skills help you navigate the messiness.

I’m fortunate enough to receive messages from people who have benefitted from the human skills curriculum I’ve created. Sarah, a senior manager in the finance industry, is usually the first person I think of: She used to fear giving her direct reports feedback, instead opting to stay up late at night amending the work herself. I facilitated a collaboration workshop for her team where she learned one of my feedback models. She used the model and gave someone direct input on their work. Her coworker was thankful rather than upset, the work got better straight away, and Sarah stopped staying up late amending things herself. As it turned out, Sarah had nothing to worry about.

That is what working well together looks like.

There will always be problems when people try to work together, and you might be working within a broken system with a toxic boss or dysfunctional organisational culture. But even in those circumstances, you have agency over one thing: how you choose to interact with people.

You can't control whether your manager gives clear direction, but you can control whether you ask clarifying questions. You can't control whether your coworker responds well to your idea, but you can control how you deliver it. You can't control the politics in your workplace, but you can control whether you contribute to them or rise above them.

How you choose to interact with people is your zone of control, and human skills give you the tools to make those choices well instead of guessing and hoping for the best.

Human skills, like technical skills, can be handled with greater or lesser skill and require proper training to develop.

When you build these skills, you stop second-guessing every interaction and start doing brilliant work that gets recognised. You become someone people actually want to work with, get chosen for opportunities, and whose career actually moves forward.

I'm building a whole world around human skills education. A world where human skills get the same serious attention we’ve long given to technical skills.

Right now, that includes:

And as part of my mission to help people like you build human skills and take the guesswork out of working with people, I’ll be sharing one long-form thoughtful idea every week to help you build your human skills and your career.

Every Monday morning, you can read the idea in my newsletter, or watch the idea on YouTube, then head to work that week and put it into practise.