Soft skills include personal and interpersonal features that form the integrated way any person approaches life. They are considered major factors of success in personal and professional well-being, therefore adding value to the overall prosperity of economies and labor markets. Soft skills include a wide range of features that tend to change every few years, mostly due to technological advances and social-economic changes. Cognitive capabilities and skills like communication, critical and analytical thinking were, until recently, emphasized, as key drivers of performance, value and productivity in the era of the thinking economy which shifted focus from traditional labor to strategic thinking. As we are now, steadily heading towards the feeling economy, more changes in skills in demand are unfolding, highlighting feelings and emotions as the new business approach in which understanding and catering to consumer’s emotions is expected to lead to stronger relationships and increased loyalty that influences decision making and thus altering the established ways of labor. Key reasons for its rise include technological changes, shift in priorities, green transition, economic uncertainty, competitive differentiation and possibly the residues of the COVID-19 pandemic that strengthen awareness towards physical and mental health, community support and emotional engagement. Moreover, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has evolved enough to perform not only repetitive tasks but also complex thinking tasks that include analyzing and learning, but still underperforms humans on tasks requiring decoding, emulating, making ethical or moral judgments and feeling. As a result, it is recently stated that the exceptional capacity of AI to perform thinking over feeling tasks is leading to a gradual increase in the demand for employees who can perform feeling tasks considering the broader social, cultural and ethical implications of decisions, thus giving rise to the feeling economy. Consequently, the present paper focuses on the expected and estimated changes that derive from the emphasis on the feeling skills mainly concerning education and employment, followed by an attempt to analyze and categorize feeling skills to occupations according to the ESCO classification and relevant research among Human Resources Managers, in order to estimate which job roles require the most human-centric skills investment. A thorough analysis of the matter is essential as it could benefit not only policies in the educational sphere but also lead to a win-win situation that could progress employees and labor markets overtime.

Keywords: Feeling economy, feeling skills, labor markets, artificial intelligence, education and training.