Technical prowess is important for securing a job. But lower-profile skills like communication and critical thinking are becoming just as crucial – if not more.
In order to do your job effectively, you need hard skills: the technical know-how and subject-specific knowledge to fulfil your responsibilities. But in a forever-changed world of work, lesser-touted ‘soft skills’ may be just as important ¬– if not even more crucial. These skills are more nuanced, even low-profile: think personal characteristics and behavior that make a strong leader or a good team member. Especially amid the normalisation of remote work, where collaboration and the ways to innovate have changed, companies are beginning to catch on to the importance of these intangibles when building out diverse, successful teams. As a result, employers are increasingly considering a candidate’s soft skills as closely as their experience and explicit technical specialties, say experts. For some workers, some soft skills are innate – personality traits that make someone a naturally good communicator or analytical thinker. But for others, developing and honing soft skills can be more challenging. Yet it is possible for every worker to develop and hone these characteristics as well as learn how to show them off.
What are soft skills?
There is no definitive list of soft skills, but the term essentially refers to abilities beyond the technical. Confidence with certain software, for instance, is a hard skill; on the other hand, knowing how to analyse different software packages to figure out what a company should be using requires critical thinking: a soft skill. Another major soft-skill area is communication. Effectively communicating with colleagues, clients and management requires dexterity and emotional intelligence. Empathy, teamwork and compassion are also skills that fall under that same umbrella.Soft skill training refers to the development and enhancement of interpersonal abilities, social skills, communication techniques, and other non-technical skills that are essential for personal and professional success. Unlike hard skills, which are job-specific and technical, soft skills are more about how you interact with others and handle various situations.
Following are the types of Soft Skills:
- Communication Skills: Effective verbal and non-verbal communication.
- Teamwork: Collaborating well with others.
- Problem-Solving: Thinking critically and creatively to find solutions.
- Leadership: Guiding and motivating others.
- Time Management: Organizing and managing time efficiently.
- Emotional Intelligence: Understanding and managing your own emotions and those of others.
- Adaptability: Being flexible and open to change.
Communication Skills are Important for clear communication, active listening, and effective presentation skills by conducting regular stand up meetings etc.Team work is the role of being a team player and working effectively and collaboratively with the colleagues.Problem-Solving and Critical Thinking help employes to navigate challenges and making the work super successful . Leaders are self motivaters and also motivates the team in positive manner. Time management increases the productivity, reduces the stress, and improve the work-life balance. By setting SMART Goals which guides participants to set their own SMART goals. This helps in prioritizing tasks and focusing on what truly matters. Emotional Intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand, manage, and influence your own emotions and the emotions of others. Adaptability plays a vital role in an organization how to adapt and adjust to new situations and challenges.
Methods of Training:
Workshops and Seminars,Online Courses and E-Learning,Role-Playing and Simulations,Mentorship and Coaching,Feedback and Reflection: Continuous improvement through regular feedback and self-assessment.
A notable shift/Outcomes of the training:
As many of the highly technical parts of work are becoming increasingly automated or replaced by technological tools, companies are instead looking for workers who can problem-solve, juggle larger responsibilities and work well with others. The ongoing labour shortage also has organisations focused on longevity: employees who have the interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence to grow into leadership positions offer a lot more value.Additionally, soft skills have become even more important in the post-pandemic, largely remote work landscape. For instance: communication can be much more nuanced and complex when workers don’t see colleagues face to face. Adaptability, too, is a soft skill – and the past two years have called for a lot of it.As a result, employers are actively soliciting candidates who have these intangibles. In a 2021 review of more than 80 million job postings across 22 industry sectors, education non-profit America Succeeds found that almost two-thirds of positions listed soft skills among their qualifications. And across all the job postings, of the 10 most in-demand skills, seven were ‘soft’, including communication, problem solving and planning. The same report showed certain types of positions prioritise soft skills even more: they were the most desired qualifications for 91% of management jobs, 86% of business-operations jobs and 81% of engineering jobs – a fact that may be surprising, since it’s a field generally considered highly technically focused.
Conclusion:
As for the interviewee, “let’s say you’re asked, ‘what’s your approach toward continuous learning?’. That’s a moment to show the interviewer you’re willing and excited about learning, and have the skills to do it. “The best response would be to say, ‘well, I went to this conference last year; I attend this webinar once a month; I just finished reading this book; I subscribe to this industry periodical.”
To best prepare for situations like these, candidates should identify their strongest soft skills in advance, and be ready to demonstrate them. The technical skills and experience on your CV will always be important, but in the changed world of work, they’re not enough: you’ll still need to convince recruiters you possess the softer skills that will help you succeed.
Leave a Reply