The article discusses soft skills and their role in the training of social educators. Currently, relying only on deep knowledge and experience in the professional field, as practice shows, is not enough. Future specialists need skills that would help them become successful in their professional activities. The authors, based on the analysis of various studies, determined that these skills are soft skills. The article analyzes foreign research and experience in the development of soft skills, both in the system of professional training of future specialists and in the training of social educators. Significant soft skills of social educators have been identified on the example of foreign countries. The relevance of soft skills in the labor market and insufficient research of the role of these skills in the professional training of domestic social educators, it became necessary to investigate the attitude of students of the educational program "Training of social educators" to the problem of soft skills. For the study, the authors used qualitative methods, namely in-depth interviews and thematic analysis. The results of the study showed that students generally represent the essence and content of the concept of soft skills, however, regarding the importance of the development of these skills in the preparation process, they are not accurate. Based on this, there is a need for purposeful work on the development of soft skills in the process of training social educators.