Our article employs a feminist perspective to interpret ethnographic data on soft skills programmes (SSPs) for female staff in Higher Education (HE). We use the story of Arachne as a metaphor for how, under neoliberalism, women are instructed to create local 'nets of power,' only to find themselves tangled in a web of conflicting expectations. Our…

Soft skills programs (SSPs) for staff are now an established part of staff learning and development in organisations. The lived experience of university staff attending these types of programmes has until now remained largely unexplored. As part of a professional doctorate in education, I used autoethnography to investigate the 'social world' of…