by Sineglossa, coordinator of Creative Soft Skills’ training methodology

How to recognize your soft skills through Jungian archetypes and narrative language, an innovative methodology

Creative Soft Skills wants to develop a methodology that identifies and strengthens the artist’s soft skills in an innovative and revolutionary way.

How? With a methodology that uses the Jungian archetypes to accompany young artists in focusing and increase the value of their own soft skills.

Why are soft skills so important?

The importance of soft skills in according to the business world, and more generally to work, is now recognized by the major research bodies and the most innovative companies in the world.

In 2013, Google launched the Oxygen project, with the aim of verifying the hypotheses on which it based its criteria for job hiring. The project produced surprising results, demonstrating how STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) skills were in the last positions among the eight characteristics shared by the best employees of the company. The first seven places are occupied by the ability to teach, to communicate, to take different points of view, to empathize with colleagues, to activate critical thinking, to creatively solve problems, to create connections in a complex system of ideas.

In 2016 the European Union published the entrepreneurial skills framework (Entrecomp). Also in this case, the main skills necessary for the development of entrepreneurship are of non-technical nature: among them there are: the ability to work in a team, to learn from experience, to manage uncertainty and to exercise creative thinking.

Even before technical skills, are personal and transversal skills that distinguish the most valuable employees.

Artists and soft skills

Soft skills and creative thinking are now considered necessary to generate innovation and a prerequisite for entering and remaining in the job market. Artists, “healthy bearers” of creative soft skills, can play a key role in this transition from technical to non-technical skills, bringing their creativity to companies, public bodies, research centers.

What is the innovative aspect of this methodology?

The use of archetypes and narrative language as tools for investigating soft skills.

Archetypes, in the formulation of the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, are “personality models” shared by the collective unconscious, belonging to an imaginary common to all human beings.

In the formulation of the religions’ historian Joseph Campbell, the jungian archetypes are associated with recurring elements in the characters and themes of myths, religions and fairy tales produced by men over the centuries and in different parts of the world.

Starting from the studies of Jung and Campbell, the screenwriter Christopher Vogler brought the archetypes to narrative thought, identifying in each models proposed by Jung a narrative function that stimulates the empathy of the reader / viewer.

In Creative Soft Skills, the Jungian archetypes will accompany young artists in identifying and developing their creative skills, to gain awareness of their abilities and understand how to value them even outside the artistic sphere.