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Despite its widespread use, and the wide range of terms used to refer to it, the concept of soft or interpersonal skills is still poorly defined. This article aims to clarify this notion and identify its different dimensions. It is based on a two-stage literature review. The first stage allowed us to identify the different current definitions and to highlight the differences between them. To deepen our conceptual exploration, in the second phase of our analysis of the literature, we compiled a corpus of thirty-nine reference works from the fields of management science, educational science, and psychology, together with professional reports to supplement these materials. The different occurrences collected were distributed by thematic coding in twenty-eight categories emerging from the content analysis. We then proceeded to a quantitative analysis by factorization and multidimensional scaling (MDS) allowing us to characterize the conceptual relationships and to group them in eight dimensions divided into two main components: personal resources and behaviors. This resulted in a framework for characterizing soft skills that reflects the full diversity of the concept. In the discussion section of this article, we examine the role of the context of application in the activation of the different dimensions of soft skills and the development of associated professional practices.