North Carolina Human Resource Professionals’ Perceptions of Soft Skill Competencies

The identification of competencies needed by hospitality managers has been investigated since the 1980s. In all of the competency research related to management, essential competencies include skills that can be classified as soft skills. The purpose of the authors in this project is to have human resource professionals rate the importance of soft skill competencies found in literature, and to determine the relative importance of the seven categories of soft skill competencies. Of the 116 soft skill competencies assessed in this study, the majority of them were deemed important, with means greater than 4.0 (on a 5 point Likert-type scale). This is an on-going comprehensive study of soft skills in entry-level management positions.