In the age where a lot is needed for you to get your dream job, technical skills alone are not enough truly effective, which is why we need to talk about why you need soft skills to excel in not just your career but in your life as well.
What are soft skills?
According to Wikipedia, these are a combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, character traits, attitudes, career attributes, social intelligence and emotional intelligence quotients among others that enable people to effectively navigate their environment, work well with others and perform well generally.
With these soft skills you can excel as a leader. Aspects like problem solving, delegating, motivating, and team building are all much easier if you have good soft skills and knowing how to get along with people – and displaying a positive attitude – are crucial for success.
The problem is, the importance of these soft skills is often undervalued, and there is far less training provided for them than hard skills. For some reason, organizations seem to expect people to know how to behave on the job.
So what are these skills and how and where can you learn them from?
1. Communication Skills
Communication skills are always top of the ‘essential skills’ list in any job advertisement.People with strong communication skills can build relationships, listen well, and vary their communication to suit the circumstances.
2. Creativity and Problem solving skills
Creativity and problem-solving skills are highly valued because they are hard to develop. There are many people who believe that creative thinkers are born, not made, and there are certainly some people who find these skills much easier. But, like other skills, you can develop them if you work to do so.
3. Decision-making skills
Being able to make decisions is key to getting on in life. Sometimes the actual decision doesn’t even matter; what matters is that you have made one and moved on.
4. Self Motivation
Believe it or not, this is also considered a skill.
We all know how employers love working with people who don’t need to be pushed.
People who are self-motivated get on by themselves. They don’t need close supervision and they are good to work with because they are generally positive about life and can be counted upon to keep going. It also helps to work on your personal resilience and adaptability to change.
5. Leadership Skills
These are the set of soft skills that we least expect someone to develop by themselves.There are many leadership training courses and you can develop these skills over time
6.Team-Working Skills
Just like good communication skills, together with an ability to build rapport, you will go a long way to support your ability to work well in a team.
7. Time Management and ability to work under pressure
These are considered more of an attitude than a skill, but are nevertheless, very important to have.
Just like leadership skills, these skills can also be developed and honed. They are highly valued by employers, are also very useful for organising a family or a team and for making sure that the job gets done.
