While hard skills demonstrate your experience and technical abilities to employers, soft skills demonstrate your ability to collaborate with others and grow within a company. Soft skills enable you to build relationships and solve problems, allowing you to contribute positively to a team or company. Soft skills can help you find new opportunities and advance your career by listing them on your resume, demonstrating them in an interview, and developing them in the workplace.
Amazing soft skills help you with brainstorming ideas during a meeting. You become the go-to consultant for some of the most impactful business issues. People usually like someone with soft skills and soft skills help with your career growth.
What are soft skills?
Soft skills are a combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, emotional intelligence, and personality traits that allow you to get along and work well with others.
Professionals, such as customer service, are intricately bound to soft skills, but every professional employs soft skills. Soft skills can be used to make your work easier or more efficient whenever you interact with a coworker, client, or customer. Soft skills development and improvement are important because they can help you perform your job tasks successfully and advance your professional development.
Soft skills are not as straightforward as hard skills which are the specific qualities that can be clearly defined, measured, and taught for success in a job.
Learning advanced techniques and methods for hard skills yield measurable results and they can be tied directly to the business’s bottom line. But for soft skills things like small talk, empathy, and flexibility are not an exact science, but they’re just as impactful.
Hard skills are for landing a job, but soft skills are to progress in your career.
Soft skills now matter a lot!
In the recent year’s labour market, the playing field has shifted. The last few years have brought new challenges that have forced businesses to do things differently, and as a result, they have changed what recruiters truly care about.
Key soft skills in the workplace are more important than ever before, with some rising to the top of recruiters’ wish lists in 2023.
Acquiring soft skills
Practice is the most effective way to learn and demonstrate soft skills. “How can I highlight soft skills in my role?” you may wonder. The answer is simple: genuine concern for others is the key to developing your soft skills and advancing your career.
Listen to your coworkers and leaders to gain a better understanding of their successes, challenges, opportunities, and concerns. Then consider whether you have any skills, experiences, advice, or resources to offer.
Practice doing this in meetings, one-on-ones, and even on team lunch breaks. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you’ll pick up these soft skills and advance your career.
Here are some soft skills important for finding a job and helping you advance your career:
Creative problem-solving and innovation
Companies have faced a series of new challenges in recent years. An employer or hiring manager does not want an employee who looks at a difficult situation or new task and says, “Wow, I don’t know what to do here.” Instead, they want to know that you can think logically and creatively to solve problems or overcome obstacles that arise on a daily basis.
They also hope that you will contribute to the generation of new ideas while addressing existing issues. And the more creative you are, the more likely you are to innovate and improve your company.
Make sure to highlight your problem-solving abilities on your resume, as well as situations where you had to use your creativity in the face of adversity to come up with innovative solutions to problems you encountered.
Express your eagerness to take on new challenges during your interview. Every job has challenges, and employers want to hire people who aren’t afraid to face them. Make it clear to your interviewer that you are one of those people.
Communication skills
This is a broad category that can include everything from how you interact with clients and colleagues to how well you communicate in emails. It is critical to be able to communicate with clients and team members. Strong communication skills are more important than ever now that most communication is done through emails, chats, video, or phone conference calls.
It is well worth your time and money to take a class on effective communication skills. It is one of the most important soft skills in any job or industry. If you already believe it is one of your strongest qualities, find a way to demonstrate it on your resume and in your interview.
Time management & scheduling
Time management entails knowing how to organise your schedule in order to complete your projects on time and with efficiency. How well can you focus on your work and manage your time to stay productive when you don’t have a boss watching you?
Many employers and hiring managers took a big risk by allowing some or all of their employees to work from home. Would their teams be genuinely productive outside of the office? Time management became a soft skill that quickly rose to the top of many recruiters’ priority lists in the absence of the natural structure that a day at the office provides.
When it comes to time management, your work calendar is your best friend. Set daily and weekly goals for yourself, and don’t be afraid to block off time on your calendar to focus on that work. If you’re preparing for a job interview, see if you can find out what project management tools the company uses and become acquainted with them. You’ll have an advantage over the competition if you can demonstrate familiarity with the tools they use.
A growth mindset
Ensure the longevity of your career by adapting to changes in your industry and the job market as a whole. With the mechanisation of jobs and industries, it is critical to have a growth mindset.
So, what exactly is a growth mindset? Professionals with a growth mindset are driven to achieve higher levels of success by constantly learning new skills in order to keep up with a changing market. It boils down to being adaptable and willing to go above and beyond your existing soft and hard skills.
Highlight examples of how you demonstrated initiative by learning a new skill that improved your performance or helped you keep up with industry changes on your resume to demonstrate your growth mindset.
Emotional intelligence
What does it mean to be emotionally intelligent? Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognise, assess, and respond to your own emotions as well as the emotions of others. This means you can think empathetically about the people around you and the interpersonal relationships that form in the workplace.
It’s made up of five key elements:
- Self-awareness
- Self-regulation
- Motivation
- Empathy
- Social skill
This is yet another of the soft skills that employers seek, and it has taken on new significance for 2023. Many people are still struggling to find their place in the workforce and in the world as we emerge from the shadow of the recent pandemic. It is critical to be able to read your coworkers’ emotions and respond compassionately.
Employers value emotional intelligence over IQ in employees, with 75% more likely to promote someone with a higher EQ (emotional quotient) than someone with a higher IQ.
Negotiation
Negotiation is a dialogue between two parties to resolve conflicts or issues in a way that is acceptable to both parties. It is usually a compromise involving give and take. Negotiation occurs when each party makes a concession to resolve a conflict for the benefit of all parties. Negotiations may take place in the workplace between managers, departments, colleagues, or between a team member and a manager. You can negotiate the job offer with the interviewer or HR manager even before you start.
Negotiation skills are inherent qualities that aid two or more parties in reaching an agreement on a logical solution. In the workplace, you may be required to use your negotiating skills in a variety of situations.
Flexibility & adaptability
Change is an unavoidable part of the modern workplace. In recent years, the lightning-fast advancement of technology has forced industries to evolve or perish. Those changes are certain to continue in the coming years, which is why adaptability is now one of the top skills employers seek in job candidates.
Whatever your role or industry, the ability to adapt to change — and a positive attitude towards change — go a long way towards building a successful career.
During the pandemic, many offices switched from 100% on-site to partially or entirely remote work. Video conferencing has become commonplace, and working and collaborating online is now considered normal. All of these factors have necessitated workers’ adaptation to new methods, technology, and ways of thinking.
Consider all of the ways you’ve had to adapt in the past and be prepared to demonstrate your ability to adapt during your next interview.
Leadership
Above soft skills are all important skills to have, leadership skills will take you to the next level. Most employers and hiring managers are always looking for someone who has the potential to advance beyond their current position.
Leadership abilities are a synthesis of all other soft skills. When you combine them, you get someone who can not only work well with the team but also take the reins and improve the rest of the team.
If you’ve previously been in charge of large projects, highlight that on your resume and in job interviews. Show that you’re not just looking to punch in and punch out, but that you’re ready to conquer this job and grow into a future leader within the company, making you an appealing investment for them.
Consider your soft skills to be complements to your hard and job-related skills. They cannot qualify you for a job on their own, but when combined with strong credentials, they can make you a much more appealing candidate.
A positive attitude is what connects all of these soft skills. Believing that there is a positive outcome in all difficult situations will help you navigate the day-to-day of your job while also making others want to work with you. These soft skills are more difficult to teach, but the payoff could be even greater, so make sure you’re auditing and improving your soft skill set.