Soft skills are a combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, character or personality traits, attitudes, career attributes, social intelligence and emotional intelligence quotients, among others, that enable people to navigate their environment, work well with others, perform well, and achieve their goals with complementing hard skills. The Collins English Dictionary defines the term "soft skills" as "desirable qualities for certain forms of employment that do not depend on acquired knowledge: they include common sense, the ability to deal with people, and a positive flexible attitude."

Soft skills is a composite expression, and each of the two words explains a defining aspect of the concept.

The word “skill” highlights the practical function. The term alone has a broad meaning, and describe a particular ability to complete tasks ranging from easier ones like “learning how to kick a ball” to harder ones like “learning how to be creative." In this specific instance, the word “skill” has to be interpreted as the ability to master hardly controlled actions.

The word “soft” is the opposite of “hard”, and implies “subjective, fuzzy, and unreliable”. Because of their subjectivity, soft skills are hardly assessed, and never fully mastered. In addition, the vagueness explains why soft skills are not always clearly understood by employers and employees.

Soft is not the only adjective used to describe this type of skills. Scientists coined the word “noncognitive  for everything that was not, in their view, grounded in or directly derived from rational thought (which they labeled cognitive)”. This term describes negatively the fact that soft skills have an undefined acceptation, underlying how “cognition is well defined and well understood, while everything else exists in a dark zone around this patch of intellectual light”.

For this reason, the more formal word “thinking dispositions” is “now preferred by many education leaders”.