85% of job success depends on soft skills

According to the National Soft Skill Association, only 15% of job success comes from hard skills.

The rest is due to soft skills that can have very concrete applications in any organisation:

• Adaptability: Learning how to use a new software tool. 
• Effective communication: Explaining a complex project to a team in simple terms and actively listening to feedback.
• Emotional intelligence: Calmly resolving a conflict between team members by finding common ground.
• Creative thinking: Suggesting a new marketing campaign inspired by another industry that sets the company apart from competitors.
• Teamwork: Coordinating tasks and supporting each other to meet a project deadline efficiently.

Hence, this is the challenge that the University of La Sabana (Colombia) faces: ensure its graduates are not only academically “hard skills”-qualified but also equipped with strong socioemotional skills.

However, the university’s current approach to assessing socioemotional skills relies primarily on manual, survey-based or self-assessment tools, which are not without shortcomings:

• Subjectivity: A student might underestimate or overestimate their level of empathy.
• Time-consuming: Lengthy questionnaires or conducting interviews manually take time.
• Difficulty in standardising across programs: Contextual factors lead to adaptations in assessments.
• Little integration in digital platforms & Fragmented data.
• No continuous feedback or real-time insights.

As a consequence, the University of La Sabana struggles to provide students with personalised feedback and build evidence-based employability programmes.

In the long term, graduates may enter the job market without a clear understanding of their socioemotional strengths or areas for improvement, making it harder to position themselves competitively. 

(It’s all the more relevant considering that the latest unemployment data in Colombia shows that the unemployment rates are twice as high for those under 25 years old vs. 25-54 years old.)

For the university, not dealing more scientifically with socioemotional skills could limit its attractiveness to students and partners and thus reduce its capacity to lead digital transformation in the Latin American higher education ecosystem.

How Human AI transforms students’ essays and interviews into socioemotional skill assessment

The startup Human AI (Spain) provides a GDPR-compliant digital platform combining natural language processing (NLP) and psycholinguistic analysis to evaluate socioemotional skills in real time. 

In other words, the system can do the following:

1. Analyse written or spoken language from students (essays, interviews, or chatbot conversations).
2. Then, by examining students’ sentence structure, word choice, tone, and coherence, pedagogical teams can infer their emotional awareness and social communication skills.

As a result:

• Educators make unbiased decisions to design personalised development plans for each student. 
• Students receive certification of their soft skills, thereby strengthening their employability and confidence. 
• Pedagogical organisations, such as the University of La Sabana, are initiating a paper-free transformation and improving the quality of academic and career guidance, positioning themselves as truly student-centred institutions in Latin America.

How the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator enhances pilot implementation and funding support

The partnership between the University of La Sabana and Human AI will benefit from three acceleration services provided by the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator:

• PoC design & Prototyping

This service will help the University of La Sabana and Human AI to co-design and implement the proof of concept for the socioemotional skills assessment platform. By defining clear objectives, KPIs (e.g., improvement in assessment accuracy or student feedback response), milestones, and risk mitigation strategies, we ensure the pilot project is well-structured, measurable, and can be executed without delays or misalignment.

• Open innovation bootcamp

This one-day intensive training will strengthen the collaboration capacity of the university’s innovation leaders with Human AI’s startup team. It will enhance their open innovation skills, fostering better communication, creative problem-solving, and agile ways of working together. This will directly benefit the partnership by increasing the speed and effectiveness of integrating the AI assessment tool into academic workflows.

• Investment Readiness & Matchmaking

The funding guidance provided by the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator will support the University of La Sabana and Human AI in identifying and pursuing relevant grants and financial mechanisms crucial to the sustainability and scalability of the platform after the pilot phase. It helps secure the financial resources required to expand the platform’s deployment to other institutions, ensuring long-term impact and viability.

A stepping stone to improved socioemotional assessment across Latin America

UNIVERSITY OF LA SABANA (Corporate)	HUMAN AI (Startup)
Certify transversal skills related to employability and emotional intelligence for its undergraduate and postgraduate students. Enhance student well-being and engagement, enabling more personalised guidance and improved academic outcomes. Reduce manual workload and administrative complexity.	Generate validated data on usability and impact by deploying and testing the Human AI system within a large university ecosystem. Pave the way for expansion across Latin America by demonstrating the platform’s scalability to Latin American higher education contexts. Reinforce its competitive position in the EdTech sector by strengthening its scientific and technical validation.

Andrés Mejía, from University La Sabana, talks about EU-LAC and the partnership with Human AI (IN SPANISH)