Mental work ability: young professionals with mental health problems perceive lower levels of soft skills

Our modern world of work requires a considerable proportion of psychological capacities, tendentially becoming constantly more important. These are for example demands for flexibility, contacts with others and group integration, decision making and judgements, endurance and proactivity (Linden et al. 2010, 2015; Parker and Bindl 2017; West et al. 2009). Young people who will be next to enter the labor market are confronted with these psychological capacity demands, even at the beginning of their professional and academic education (“studies”) period (Goastellec and Ruiz 2015; Schmidt et al. 2019).

Recent studies showed that young people are not only faced with demands for psychological capacities before entering the labor market. A part of them are also already suffering from physical or mental health problems or even both (Pacheco et al. 2017; Wege et al. 2016; Auerbach et al. 2018; Mullins et al. 2017).

Chronic health problems are usually life-long health problems, starting often at a young age (Stansfeld et al. 2008). The problem is that they usually do not make the entry into and success within the labor market easier (Varekamp et al. 2006; Small et al. 2016).

Young professionals affected from health problems are faced with work participation problems and the need to cope with them. Research has shown that observed and self-perceived health-related participation problems are congruent (Linden et al. 2018b).

Build on these facts, the research question arises how young professionals with different health problems perceive their own psychological capacity level, in comparison to healthy students. This will shed light on the type of possible impairments and may give way for specific actions: workplace adjustment or trainings concerning specific capacities.

An online questionnaire was distributed in different colleges. In order to gather a heterogeneous sample, all subjects and types of colleges (state and private, scientific and practice-oriented colleges) were included. Participants filled in their socio-demographics, including study-related aspects: number of semesters studied until now, high-school leaving degree, absence duration from their educational setting within the past 12 months. Additionally, the students were asked whether they suffered from a physical or a mental health problem, or both.

Psychometric scales were then given, including the exam anxiety scale (Hodapp et al. 2011), the Procrastination Scale (GPS‑K, Klingsiek and Fries 2018), the scale for self-efficacy in studies (adapted from Schyns and Collani 2002), the college phobia scale (adapted from the workplace phobia scale WPS, Muschalla and Linden 2009), and the psycho-mental capacities self-rating Mini-ICF-APP‑S (Linden et al. 2018).

553 young professionals opened the questionnaire, and 365 finished and could be included into analysis with full data. 238 had no health problems, 47 had physical health problems, 40 had mental health problems, and 40 had physical and mental health problems.

On the one hand, data show that some capacity dimensions are associated with mental health problems, but not with physical health problems. These were the so-called soft skills which require psychological functions such as interactional capacities (contact, group, assertiveness), planning and structuring, proactivity, flexibility. These capacities are not bound to specific contents, in contrast to capacities which rather refer to specific knowledge or content issues. This finding is similar to what is known from middle-aged persons: those with mental health problems report lower capacity levels than mentally healthy persons (Linden et al. 2018a).

On the other hand, some capacities are perceived similarly among students with and students without health problems. These are the capacities which reflect more content-associated issues: applying expertise, decision making. Applied to the field of profession-oriented education, as has been done here, these capacities reflect professional capacities. In such “content-directed” capacities young professionals with and without health problems are equally fit, because this is a relevant entrance capacity to professional education.

Students with physical health problems report similar psychological capacity levels like healthy students. A physical health problem may be associated with a higher need for the person to adjust to difficult context conditions, applying for assistance or inventing new ways of active coping (Dempster et al. 2015; Reynolds et al. 2016), adjusting to or tolerating conditions, and using self-help means (Lambert et al. 2017). Students with physical health problems thus may be faced with rather higher demands for flexibility, group integration and tolerance of context conditions. It may be that they are well trained in these capacities and therefore do not perceive restrictions in comparison to completely healthy persons.

Psychosomatic patients (Linden et al. 2018), as well as students with mental health problems report partly similar profiles of their capacities: They see capacity problems in assertiveness, proactivity, endurance and flexibility, rather than in adherence to regulations, or decision making or competency. Mental health problems are regularly chronic in their nature (Stansfeld et al. 2008) and thus may appear with similar capacity problems in different age groups, and over the life span. Longitudinal studies on psychological capacities are needed, but the here reported data suggest at least that the most often perceived problems in different age groups seem to be interactional problems (assertiveness), activity-related problems (endurance, proactivity), and flexibility.

The fact that healthy students judge their capacities partly lower than do older persons from the general population is congruent to findings in a large psychosomatic patient sample. Furthermore, it was found that older patients perceive their psychological capacities as better than younger patients (Linden et al. 2018). Similar findings are also discussed for other capacities, for example wisdom, which seems to be higher in the middle years of life than in the early years (Ardelt and Oh 2016).

The obtained data from this present investigation support the idea that preventive action for young professionals at risk—similar to mid-life employees at risk—may focus on supporting interactional, self-management and soft skills (McEwan et al. 2017; Oakman et al. 2018; Carolan et al. 2017). This is even more important as nowadays team work and other interactional and management capacities are required in almost all professional fields (Kauffeld and Lehmann-Willenbrock 2011; McEwan et al. 2017; BAuA 2019).

Capacity trainings and optimization of resources can be offered by companies within occupational health programs. These can be fruitful for job beginners as well as other employees. There is a broad variety of evaluated behavior-oriented trainings which can be conducted in single or group settings (Linden et al. 2015). In each single case, specific interventions for the specific capacities of interest must be chosen (instead of delivering one standard training to everybody). According to the person-job/role-fit-model (French 1973), the specific job situation and job demands and the capacity profile of the trainee must be considered: a shy sales employee might need training of contact and interactional capacities, a person newly promoted into a leading position might be trained in team (leading) capacity and decision making, whereas a technician might rather need specific competence skills. Employers must also be aware of the fact that not everybody can be trained to become a champion. People have different capacity profiles and different limitations in trainability. Finding the right person-job-fit, i.e. the right person for specific tasks, is another way of successful coping with mental work demands. (Young) employees self-reports of their capacity profiles can be used as a starting point for finding the right person-job-fit.