A Hard Look at Soft Skills: Empathy in Tech
The other day, I saw a resume that stopped me in my tracks. I look at a lot of resumes for a lot of reasons, but I’ve never seen one like this. It belonged to a UX designer who listed the word “empathy” under the skills section. In tech, that area of the resume is usually reserved for terms like “Python” and “React” and “Go” (insert dad joke about my fear of snakes) or everyone’s favorite skill, “Microsoft Word.” But there it was: empathy, a bullet point in a list of other skills that brought out my inner mental health nerd and made me question everything I thought I knew about resumes.
It made me wonder why we don’t talk about empathy more at work—why it seems almost taboo to discuss, yet it’s generally expected from every employee. And of course, I wondered why I never saw empathy on a resume until that moment. So, I set out to examine the term and its implications in tech. Here’s what I learned on my utterly unscientific journey.
Empathy in tech—beyond UX design
I started with what I knew: a UX designer definitely needs empathy. The job is all about understanding user perspectives and improving user experiences. I’ve seen this first hand in my work with UX designers. But what other roles require empathy, and how might it be used as a skill? This is what I came up with:
Client Support – to effectively provide customer service, solve problems, and generally keep users happy, client support staff need empathy. At the very least, they need to feign care for clients’ frustrations. And that requires understanding the clients’ perspectives.
Engineering – understanding others’ emotional perspectives allows developers to build more effective tools and technologies, to operate successfully within their teams, and to influence others.
Human Resources – whether recruiting talent, growing teams, or managing issues, employees in HR roles must be able to identify with a variety of people and situations.
Management – to lead others, managers need to understand people’s career goals, strengths, and insecurities, and they must coach them accordingly. This requires some level of empathy.
Marketing – empathy helps marketing teams understand their audience’s emotions and speak to them on that level. In this capacity, empathy can be a useful persuasion tool.
Product Management – a product manager must empathize with consumers, development teams, senior leadership, and other stakeholders to guide product goals to fruition.
Program and Project Management – helping teams plan, achieve goals, and move beyond obstacles requires a deft ability to understand and align many different perspectives and priorities.
Technical Writing – tech writers need to put themselves in the user’s position—often empathizing with new users—to create effective documentation, whether it’s an API reference, a user guide, or a blog post.
A complex, tough to measure term
So, a lot of tech jobs require empathy. But why don’t we talk about empathy as a professional skill? I brought the question to my therapist, who graciously follows me on my tangents into the emotional side of pretty much everything, strangers’ resumes included.
“Well,” she said, her head bouncing side to side as she pondered the question. “How would a person know if they have empathy? I think most people would say they’re empathetic.”
She had a point. I don’t know anyone who would outright say “I have trouble with empathy.” Beyond that, empathy is difficult to measure. It’s often contextual, dependent on the perceptions of complicated human beings. My therapist thumbed through her phone for resources to give me. I left with a link to the Empathy Quotient test and her warning: “We don’t know how the test is scored.”
Still, it was something. Once I got home, I took the test. It consisted of 60 questions—things like “I’m good at predicting what someone will do” and “I don’t like to take risks.” For each question, I answered either strongly agree, slightly agree, slightly disagree, or strongly disagree. An average score on the test ranges from 33-52 out of a possible 80, and my result was a 56. That generally didn’t tell me much. I can’t imagine citing this score on a resume or in an interview. I’d probably get laughed out of the room. But that’s not to say the Empathy Quotient is useless.
Empathy and neurodivergence
According to this scholarly article by the Empathy Quotient creators, the assessment was conceived as a way to research Autism Spectrum disorders. This brings up an interesting point: many people in tech express empathy differently from neurotypical people, and some might have different capacities for empathy. These people certainly aren’t useless—they contribute a wide range of knowledge and skills to the industry and the world at large.
Acknowledging this made me wonder if understanding empathy in a skills context might help or hurt those with empathy challenges. I certainly want everyone to have an equal opportunity for a seat at the tech table. On the one hand, seeing empathy on the same level as writing or math skills makes it recognizable as something that can be cultivated and grown. On the other, a person’s given neurological ability to feel and express empathy shouldn’t affect their chances at a job they’re otherwise qualified for. Either way, I think talking about empathy more in a business context can help us all understand those issues and better address them. If nothing else, it helps people who are stronger at empathy understand why some people might not be, and how everyone can work together for better results.
Cultivating empathy
Watch any episode of The Office (US), and you’ll see several examples of just how cringeworthy a lack of empathy can be. Nearly the whole show is predicated on the awkward moments that ensue when coworkers fail to understand each other’s perspectives and emotions. In that context, it’s hilarious. In real life, it’s not quite as entertaining. It’s hard, and people’s feelings, careers, and lives are at stake.
While each person has a unique experience with empathy, we can cultivate it as an organization by talking about it, asking questions, and helping each other understand. Not everyone has a natural proclivity for empathy or emotional discussions, but that’s not to say we can’t work together to improve. The first step is starting the conversation. There are also a lot of current trainings that can help spark and continue those dialogues, such as Insights Discovery and Crucial Conversations. If the corporate classroom’s not your thing, that’s okay too. The most important way to cultivate empathy, in my opinion, is by listening.
The takeaway
So should you add empathy to your resume? Well, maybe. For some positions, it makes more sense than others. If applying to technical writer roles, for example, it might make more sense for me to talk about empathy in an interview. That way, I can give detailed context and concrete examples. Another option is defining how I’ve used empathy in a single, succinct sentence on the resume. Either way, listing “empathy” as an amorphous bullet point on the page doesn’t quite communicate the intricacies of the skill itself.
More than anything, I’d like to see people talking more openly about empathy in the workplace. It’s such a vital aspect of creating harmonious, productive teams and technology that resonates with users. So often, people get caught up in workplace conundrums—drama, politics, perceived inequities. I wonder how many of these issues could be solved or even prevented with a little empathy training, whatever that looks like.
Acknowledging people’s varying experiences with empathy can help teams and organizations work better together. It all comes down to recognizing a basic truth: we’re all human. And understanding how, why, and when empathy is needed helps us make sure everyone’s included in tech—on our teams, in our workplaces, and among our users.