Professional expertise
"Professional expertise" has always been a disputed topic when employers had to select fresh high school graduates for openings. How would an employer determine if a graduate with hardly any work experience is suitable? The grades of the diploma can be a solid indicator concerning the fundamental qualifications of the applicant. It can imply several things, such as discipline towards studying or affinity towards sciences.
But over the past years, it became clear that the most important qualification of an applicant is his social competence. Here, researchers, analysts, and publicizes vary the terms between "social competence", "social skills" or "soft skills".
You can read a lot about this development. The bottom line is that soft skills are currently very important and will most likely gain even more relevance in the near future. Due to the internationalization, globalization, and digitalization, almost every job will have an interpersonal component, e.g. working in international mixed teams, communicating with customers worldwide, etc. Hence, professional expertise is still relevant and has to be developed, but at the beginning, it is of utmost importance to have well-developed social skills.