The Safety of Work

Ep. 127: Should safety education focus on hard skills

Feb 9, 2025

The podcast dives into the balance between hard and soft skills in safety education, challenging traditional views on their categorization. It emphasizes the importance of narrative skills, highlighting their role in communicating values and driving change. Insights from UK business leaders showcase the critical need for effective storytelling in safety. The conversation advocates for integrating both technical expertise and narrative capabilities, ultimately redefining how safety professionals are prepared for complex organizational landscapes.

44:20

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Quick takeaways

The podcast highlights the necessity for safety education to integrate technical skills with narrative capabilities for effective organizational communication.

It emphasizes that all graduates should be trained in narrative skills to enhance both their interpersonal effectiveness and technical proficiency in the workplace.

Deep dives

The Debate on Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills

The conversation centers on the debate between hard skills and soft skills in safety education. One perspective is that the distinction between hard and soft skills is unhelpful; instead, skills should be categorized based on specificity versus transferability. Technical skills, like a nurse measuring blood pressure, represent specific task skills, while others, like communication, can be cultivated over various contexts. This reframing emphasizes the importance of looking at skills as interconnected rather than being strictly separate categories.

Intro

2min

Rethinking Hard and Soft Skills in Safety Education

2min

Navigating Skills: Hard vs. Soft in Business

7min

The Complex Value of Safety Education in Economic Context

1min

The Role of Higher Education in Social Mobility

2min

The Power of Narrative in Business Communication

13min

The Power of Narrative in a Digital Age

16min

Drawing on insights from business leaders and contemporary educational theory, we propose that effective safety professionals require both technical expertise and sophisticated narrative capabilities. The findings suggest significant implications for safety education and professional development, challenging institutions to reconsider how they prepare safety practitioners for increasingly complex organizational environments. Rather than perpetuating false dichotomies between hard and soft skills, we argue for an educational approach that develops both technical and narrative capabilities in an integrated manner, particularly crucial for safety change management where success depends on both procedural competence and compelling storytelling.

Discussion Points:

(00:00) Introduction - Should safety education focus on hard or soft skills?
(01:04) Background - Safety Science Innovation Lab and higher education context
(02:27) Hard vs Soft Skills - Discussing the limitations of this categorization
(05:08) Storycraft Report - Overview and methodology of the Oxford study
(15:00) Understanding Narrative - Definitions and importance in business
(18:15) Three Core Business Purposes of Narrative: Communicating business values, persuasion and influence, driving and managing change
(26:06) Five Essential Narrative Skills Framework: Narrative communication, empathy and perspective taking, critical analysis, creativity and imagination, digital skills
(36:00) Who Needs Narrative Skills - Integration of STEM and humanities in education
(40:35) Three Key Takeaways - Value of tertiary education, importance of narrative skills in safety, managing change
The answer to our question: Should safety education focus on hard skills or soft skills? If you didn’t like the question, I think you will like the answer, which is: We should stop dividing the world into hard skills and soft skills, or into STEM and into humanities. Just teach everyone both.
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Quotes:

“There are different skill categories, but they’re mostly about specific skills versus transferable skills.” - Drew

“One of the things that Griffith [University] was specifically set up for is based on the idea that education is important for social mobility.” - Drew

“A narrative in business is the communication of a business activity or idea…it’s the ability to tell your story or your direction.”- David

“if a business can convey some narrative or strategic vision about who they are and what they’re doing, they’re going to get much more useful work out of their employees.” - Drew

Resources:

Storycraft: the importance of narrative and narrative skills in business

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