Day: November 19, 2025

• As AI takes on more repetitive tasks, soft skills may become more critical in the workplace.
• Executives and workplace transformation experts shared which soft skills workers should develop.
• They said problem-solving, emotional intelligence, and creativity are especially critical.

You can’t escape the call for soft skills.

As AI increasingly augments repetitive tasks, human connection is becoming more valuable in many workplaces. Even in technical fields, like engineering, developing skills that allow you to collaborate with others can help you prove your worth.

“Equally important are your soft skills, like critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and teamwork,” LinkedIn’s VP of Engineering for Talent Solutions, Prashanthi Padmanabhan, recently told Business Insider.

The rising importance of soft skills doesn’t mean you need to suddenly become a social butterfly at work — although that might not hurt. Workplace observers have said that extroverted personalities can offer an advantage in the current workforce because human-centered tasks can’t be as easily offloaded by AI.

But which soft skills are most important? And how can you highlight the ones you possess when looking for a new job? Business Insider spoke with seven workforce transformation experts, as well as executives from LinkedIn, IBM, and Cisco about the soft skills that will be most important in the AI era.

Read on to learn more about three skills they identified:

1. Problem solving

Your therapist’s advice may only be as good as the information you share with them — and the same goes for AI.

Large language models can generate instant suggestions, but it’s up to employees to identify the right problems, craft effective prompts, and determine the best course of action based on the insights it spits out.

“Even if AI is helping with consulting work, it’s still not so great,” said Michael Housman, founder and lead strategist at AI-ccelerator, a firm specializing in AI education and consulting. That means job seekers should work on developing skill sets that are “complementary to what machines are really good at,” Housman told Business Insider.

Housman, who is also the author of “Future Proof: Transform Your Business with AI (or Get Left Behind),” said that job seekers should focus on developing — and highlighting — their complex problem-solving skills. That means thinking about how to solve complicated challenges with “ambiguous inputs and metrics for success,” he said.

Guy Diedrich, Cisco’s senior vice president and global innovation officer, told Business Insider previously that critical thinking and problem-solving will become crucial as the pace of AI innovations leads to companies making significant ethical decisions. He said “asking the right questions” about what should be done will be the most important skill humans can develop.

2. Emotional intelligence

Alex King, founder and managing director of ExpandIQ, told Business Insider that self-awareness and the ability to read the room will become increasingly necessary in the AI age.

That involves tapping into your “gut feeling” and understanding situations where you need to lean in or step back, he said.

“People who have those soft skills around self-awareness and emotional intelligence are going to do really well in the future, because that’s obviously something AI cannot do,” said King, who also served as the former head of global talent acquisition at software-development firm Integrate.

Ruchir Puri, IBM’s chief scientist, similarly told Business Insider that while most successful CEOs probably have a high IQ, their success relies more on their ability to connect with others and communicate efficiently, which he refers to as the “emotional quotient” and “relationship quotient.”

“The advice I’ll give is always be empathetic,” Puri said. “Put yourself in their shoes and see why they are reacting the way they are.”

That level of awareness also extends to communication and ensuring that there’s “clarity” in the way you’re expressing ideas.

“Don’t just express a concept. Make sure the concept is at a level that they can understand,” Puri said, adding that “it’s not just what you say; it’s how you say it.”

3. Creativity and Imagination

With AI augmenting more busy work, many executives have said that there will be more time for “deep work,” including expansive thinking and idea generation.

That could be especially true in software engineering. As AI accelerates the process required to launch products and helps solve the issue of “scarcity of developers,” Cisco’s CPO Jeetu Patel previously told Business Insider that imagination will be “the only constraint.”

That means there will likely be a greater emphasis on developing fresh, high-quality ideas.

Terri Horton, an AI strategy and workforce transformation consultant at the boutique advisory firm FuturePath, told Business Insider that creativity is becoming increasingly important. Not only does that mean coming up with unique ideas for how to do your job, but it also includes thinking about where AI can be applied to make work more efficient.

“If we are replacing or removing, let’s say, 30% of the tasks that are associated with the role and replacing them with AI, what else can you do?” Horton said. “How can you leverage your creativity to work collaboratively with your functional leader or to help think about how that role can be redesigned?”

LinkedIn’s Padmanabhan, told Business Insider that candidates are increasingly using the interview process to highlight their creativity by showcasing a concept they have brought to life.

“If you don’t have the coding experience, but you have a brilliant idea in your head — just build something,” Padmanabhan said.

The Philippines has been rocked for months by protests against multibillion-dollar corruption involving controversial flood control projects—an issue which President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. called attention to in his State of the Nation speech in July.

Now, however, Marcos’ government faces one of its greatest challenges in quelling public outcry, and his rivals are using the furor against him.

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Most recently, the President’s sister, Senator Imee Marcos, who has publicly sided with her own family’s rival political dynasty, the Dutertes, took the opportunity at an anti-corruption rally in Manila on Monday to attack her brother.

“Ever since Bongbong and I were kids, the whole family already knew the problem about him,” Imee Marcos said to around half a million rallygoers. “Back then, because our father was still around, he wasn’t my responsibility yet. As he grew older, it became more concerning. I knew that he was using drugs.”

The drug-use accusations echoed those that have been lobbed back and forth between President Marcos Jr. and his predecessor, former President Rodrigo Duterte. It also, experts tell TIME, shows how the public’s genuine concerns about graft in government have been relegated to the latest ammunition in an ongoing fight for political power between the country’s two foremost political families.

“People have tried to divert the situation, the gravity of the situation, in so many ways,” says Jean Encinas-Franco, professor of political science at the University of the Philippines. “It veers away from the real issue, which is the current investigations, which should be expedited.”

“Both the Marcos and the Duterte camps are using this to hit one another,” says Aries Arugay, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. “The corruption scandal in the Philippines has to be seen through the prism of this polarizing war, again between the Marcoses and the Dutertes.”

“It really, unfortunately, has become basically a political weapon,” Arugay adds. “And it really depends on who uses it in a smarter way.”

A scandal, weaponized

Marcos Jr. is facing the “probably the worst crisis of his Administration,” says Encinas-Franco. “Whatever moves he will make in the near future about this corruption scandal will really make a mark in his legacy as President.”

That’s what makes it such an opportunity for those who wish to succeed him. With the country’s next presidential election in 2028, in which Marcos Jr. cannot run for reelection per the Philippine Constitution, the Dutertes have been eyeing a comeback and were emboldened by positive results in midterm elections earlier this year.

But they never really went away. The Marcoses and Dutertes ran on the same ticket in the 2022 elections, with Rodrigo Duterte’s daughter Sara Duterte-Carpio becoming Marcos Jr.’s Vice President. Their alliance, however, quickly crumbled as Duterte-Carpio appears to have ambitions for the top job. In an escalation of the family feud, Marcos Jr. allowed Rodrigo Duterte to be arrested in March and jailed in The Hague where he faces charges before the International Criminal Court of crimes against humanity, and Duterte-Carpio was almost impeached over an alleged threat against the life of the President.

Now as corruption concerns have galvanized the public, the Dutertes appear to be seizing the opportunity to direct outrage at Marcos Jr., while Marcos Jr.’s camp has also appeared to do the same to the Dutertes.

Imee Marcos did not offer any concrete evidence for her drug accusations, though she also named the First Lady and Marcos Jr.’s sons among the alleged drug users. “Sen. Imee, I hope you’ll be patriotic,” presidential spokesperson Claire Castro said Monday. “Help in the investigation that your own brother has been doing. You should condemn all those corrupt—don’t side with them, don’t hide them. Let President Marcos Jr. work to stop all the corruption.” Castro added the next day: “We can see who she’s protecting. We can see she wants to malign the President but protect those who have corruption issues—the Vice President.”

Marcos Jr. has been criticized for moving too slow on holding people to account, especially as his cousin and speculated future presidential candidate, former House Speaker Martin Romualdez, was also implicated. A lawmaker accused the cousins of receiving 56 billion Philippine pesos (about $950 million) from the flood control schemes, which the President’s camp has dismissed as propaganda. 

In one survey conducted by Philippine pollster Social Weather Stations, Marcos Jr.’s trust ratings have dipped after the exposure of flood-control corruption, as have Duterte-Carpio’s. WR Numero Research President Cleve Arguelles said that Marcos Jr.’s performance satisfaction ratings are expected to further dip following the scandal and the seemingly slow response of his Administration to it.

“The President now faces a profound crisis of confidence, especially in the way these corruption investigations are being handled, which appear to lack both direction and resolve,” Duterte-Carpio said in a video posted on her Facebook page Monday. “We also seek clear answers on how a budget that deprived Filipinos of billions and billions of pesos was approved under his watch.” 

Days earlier, the Vice President said that Marcos should jail himself over the flood control issue, setting herself up for victory as she maintains her lead as Filipino’s preferred successor to Marcos Jr. for the 2028 national elections.

One of Duterte’s sons, Davao City 1st District Rep. Paolo Duterte, has also called for a probe into the accusations against Marcos and Romualdez. 

But the Dutertes have also been on the receiving end of the politicization of the flood-control corruption scandal. The interagency panel created by the President to investigate the anomalies in flood control infrastructure has been called upon to look into flood control projects in the Davao region in Mindanao—known to be a stronghold of the Duterte dynasty. Paolo Duterte has denied that the projects in his jurisdiction are “ghost” projects. 

The Marcos Administration has also insinuated that corruption existed during Duterte-Carpio’s six-year tenure as Davao mayor, before she became Vice President in 2022. “Did she ever do anything to hold those corrupt accountable?” Castro, the presidential spokesperson, said in a livestream Monday responding to Duterte-Carpio’s video remarks. “Did she ever look for the 13,917 flood control projects during her father’s time [as President]?” (Before serving as President from 2016 to 2022, Rodrigo Duterte also served as Davao mayor on and off for more than 20 years through multiple terms since 1988, and he was re-elected in absentia in May, with his other son Sebastian, who was elected vice mayor, acting as mayor while Rodrigo remains jailed in The Hague.)

As the public clamors for arrests of top officials over the flood-control corruption, Marcos Jr. has warned that powerful politicians involved in the scheme will be jailed by Christmas—and these may include Duterte-allied individuals.

Arugay, from ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, says he expects Marcos Jr. to back attempts to unearth corruption schemes that could expose the Duterte dynasty in a bid to take the heat off himself.

“Let’s not underestimate Marcos Jr.,” Arugay said, “because he’s still President, and he has the tools.”