Assessment of Soft Skills and Development of Human Resource Management in The Labour Market Competitiveness

Introduction. Soft skills are critical and directly affect job performance, adaptability, and the ability to innovate. Soft skills such as creativity, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and interpersonal interaction increase adaptability to innovation. Readiness for continuous learning and retraining through soft skills is crucial for professional success and competitiveness in the labour market. Aim and tasks. This study comprehensively examines the impact of soft skills on professional competitiveness in the labour market. It develops a multi-level system for assessing these skills, with recommendations for their development in human resource management. Results. The study highlighted the most in-demand skills based on feedback from academics and employers: responsibility (18.2%), creativity (18.9%), communication skills (17.3%), self-organisation (17.2%), emotional intelligence (15.9%), and leadership (12.5%). The content analysis confirms a certain degree of research into job seekers’ demand for soft skills in the labour market. This emphasises its relevance in higher or professional education settings. The employee competitiveness index (ECI) is a composite indicator that integrates the key characteristics of soft skills and amounts to 0.75%. The structural model of the study allowed us to estimate the impact of soft skills on labour productivity both directly and through employment and market demand. In the model, soft skills accounted for 18% of the variance in employment and 30% in market demand, with both indicators exerting significant effects on productivity (β = 0.32 and β = 0.29, respectively). Conclusions. The soft skills of modern specialists indicate their competitiveness in the labour market. The criteria and indicators of soft skills (communication, emotional intelligence, creativity and analytical thinking, flexibility and adaptability, self-organisation and productivity, leadership and management skills) are highlighted, emphasising the vectors for developing these skills. The presence of soft skills increases a specialist’s competitiveness and serves as an indicator of this competitiveness. The development of soft skills increases the competitiveness of employees and contributes to efficiency growth. However, a limitation was identified: some organisations were reluctant to disclose training results, which requires further study.