The socio-technical instruments for the exploitation of soft skills, in particular of audiences in training, aim to circumvent the value of qualifications and/or technical skills, in favor of characteristics described as deeper for the individual, whose socio-professional ordeals are convertible into resources. These instruments are not free of paradoxes: by only partially freeing themselves from the effects of educational capital, they take the risk of an invisibilization of social inequalities. Moreover, if they turn away from the symbolic value of structures in favour of the analysis of behaviours and lived experience, they do not necessarily question the hierarchies in the social world. There remains an ambivalence in the construction of the relationship to oneself between emancipation from social norms linked to academic excellence and/or professional success, and weakening of the critique of educational and practical production processes by the individualization of standards of achievement.