Soft skills and earnings: evidence from a nationwide survey in Poland

The purpose of this paper is to examine differences in earnings in Poland with respect to the level of soft skills. The study is based on data from a nationwide survey on human capital carried out in 2014. Eight types of soft skills are taken into consideration: entrepreneurship and showing initiative, resistance to stress, cooperation in a group, communicativeness, ability to resolve conflicts, coordination of the work of other employees, creativity and continuous learning of new things. Distributions of earnings corresponding to groups of individuals declaring low, medium and high soft skills are compared by statistical methods, namely by kernel estimation, one-way ANOVA on ranks and relative distributions. The analysis leads to the conclusion that earnings distributions vary substantially with regard to the level of soft skills. The biggest differences concern such skills as entrepreneurship and showing initiative, coordination of the work of other employees and creativity. This paper contributes to the knowledge about the associations between soft skills level and earnings.