Soft Skill Rating: From Idea to Publication in Record Time

What only began as a bold initiative in March 2025 is now approaching its first milestone: the imminent publication of Soft Skill Rating – Training and Management of Social Competence with Springer Gabler. Edited by Dr. Oliver Everling and Dominik Wever, this collective volume brings together the expertise of more than 30 leading professionals from business, science, and consulting who have, within just a few months, created a comprehensive reference on one of the most decisive factors in today’s working world.

The speed of realization is extraordinary, not least because the book tackles a topic that has long been underexplored: how to systematically evaluate, develop, and strategically deploy soft skills. These are no longer regarded as elusive “nice-to-haves,” but as hard success factors that determine careers, corporate cultures, and even entire industries. The chapters range from resilience in high-pressure contexts and energy management as a new dimension of social competence to the impact of soft skills on start-up investments, financial transactions, and international cooperation.

A distinctive strength of this work is the interplay between proven assessment methods and cutting-edge technologies. Artificial intelligence, speech and video analytics, emotion recognition, and immersive virtual reality training environments all open up new opportunities to make soft skills more measurable, comparable, and scalable. At the same time, the contributors emphasize that human judgment, ethics, and acceptance remain at the heart of every process.

As publication now draws near, it becomes clear that Soft Skill Rating will serve as a standard reference – moving soft skills out of the shadows of vague intuition and positioning them as measurable, manageable, and strategically vital resources for the future of work.