Delicacy: a quality of those who don’t harm, doesn’t offend the soul, but on
the contrary, it blandishes this latter, inducing a pleasant sensation.
When I started writing my book on soft skills, back in 2015, I thought about naming it Delicacy in the Luggage because the final message that I would have wanted to
transmit was that life at the end is a journey, and in the luggage that collects what is important to have along the way, delicacy is unmissable. Because when we talk
about soft skills, we rightly imagine a set of qualities such as: kindness, courtesy, politeness, discretion, elegance, finesse, grace, refinement, and sensitivity, i.e. all the synonyms of ‘delicacy’.
Eight years ago, few people knew the meaning of soft skills, none knew how many and which were the skills to develop and, above all, there was a widespread belief
among insiders that the skills so valuable and sought after in the world of work (and beyond) were something innate: with soft skills you are somehow born with them.
This was the common feeling, ‘there are those who are more gifted and those who are not’. I remember defining soft skills in the preface of my book as ‘those skills that no school course teaches but that are so useful in everyday life’.
In reality, in this digital and hyperconnected era, things evolve at the speed of light, or should we say ‘fibre’, so today there are courses like the one sponsored by Lusso
Gentile that teach transversal skills to the young people who perhaps need them most: those who work and live in the tourism industry. People who more than
others need to acquire skills such as kindness, empathy, refinement. So if the past in the world of soft skills was shrouded in a mist of mystery and sometimes even confusion (I remember reading among the transversal skills even personal hygiene and knowledge of the English language!), the present are schools and training session specifically aimed at building and enhancing transversal skills.
Because nowadays everyone knows that it is not enough to be skilled in one’s profession… Hard skills alone are not enough! It is necessary to focus on soft skills, now rightly considered just as important as hard skills, in many cases even more so than hard skills.