If you've spent any time around skills frameworks, careers literature, or job ads, you've probably bumped into the same split everywhere: technical skills on one side, transferable or 'soft' skills on the other. The technical ones get treated as the real, measurable, learnable skills. The transferable ones get treated as something else - character traits, vibes, things you either have or you don't.
At Common Flow, we use the term human skill to describe what we actually mean — the full set of capabilities a person uses to do work. Every kind of work. There aren't two categories. There's one.
The problem with the split
Pick any 'technical' skill. Welding, software development, accounting, anaesthetics, electrical work. Now look at what someone actually does when they use it.
A welder reads a job specification. They observe the metal in front of them, comparing it against what the spec calls for. They analyse where the weld needs to go and synthesise that with what they know about heat, distortion, and fit-up. They communicate with the people around them about hold points and safety. They make decisions on the fly when conditions change. They work alongside other tradies on a site that has its own rhythm and its own constraints.
None of that is 'soft' support around the welding. It's the welding.
The same pattern shows up the other way around. Pick what people usually call a soft skill, say, analysing information. The analyst sits down at a computer. They navigate software, type queries, manipulate spreadsheets, write notes. They use a keyboard, a screen, a chair, a workflow. They might physically write something down. They might enter data into a system that requires them to know how that system behaves. The 'cognitive' work is wrapped in technical operation. You can't pull them apart without the work falling over.
One pool, not two
Once you start looking, the split dissolves everywhere you check it. A nurse administering medication is performing precision technical work, exercising clinical judgement, communicating with a patient who is anxious, coordinating with colleagues, and applying knowledge under time pressure. A carpenter framing a wall is doing physical work and spatial reasoning and team communication and material judgement. A teacher running a classroom is reading the room, planning the lesson, executing the plan, adjusting in real time, and using whatever technology the school has bolted to the wall.
None of these jobs sit on one side of a binary. They're all using a mix. The mix is the work.
That's what a human skill is. It's any of the capabilities — observing, analysing, deciding, communicating, planning, coordinating, executing, serving, enduring, and the rest — that a human actually uses to do a thing. Some of them are about how you process information. Some are about how you move your body. Some are about how you read other people. Some are about how you operate a tool. They're all human skills because a human is the one doing them.
Why the language matters
Treating transferable skills as a separate, lesser category has real costs. It teaches young people that the things they're best at aren't really skills. It makes it harder for career-changers to articulate what they bring. It lets employers undervalue the parts of the work that actually carry the load. It tells people from caring professions that the capabilities they've spent decades developing don't quite count.
Treating technical skills as somehow free of human judgement has costs too. It feeds the assumption that anything technical can be replaced by a process or a machine, and that anything else is fluff. Both halves of the split push the conversation in unhelpful directions.
Calling them all human skills doesn't flatten the differences. A welder and a counsellor are doing very different work. But the differences are about which mix of skills the work draws on, not about whether the skills are real.
What this changes
If you're an individual, this means the things you're good at - including the things that nobody has ever called a skill - count. The way you read a room, settle a younger sibling, hold a difficult conversation, organise five things at once: those are skills. They sit alongside whatever you've trained for, not underneath it.
If you're an employer, it means your job ad is probably describing only half of what the job needs. The technical specs are easy to write down. The capabilities that make someone good at the role - the judgement, the responsiveness, the way they handle pressure or other people - usually don't make it onto the page. They're still part of the work.
If you're an educator, it means the things you build in students that don't sit neatly inside a subject area aren't extras. They're as much a part of what the student is learning as the curriculum.
One pool. One language. The skills are all human, because the people doing them are.