Learn what soft skills are and how to develop them to enhance your personal and professional success.Discover the importance of effective communication, teamwork, problem-solving, adaptability.
Job postings say that employers are looking for “stress-resistant” and “learnable” candidates: these are not just general words, but soft skills, or “flexible” skills that can really help in business. We explain what they are, why they are important for a career, and how to evaluate and develop them.
What are soft skills?
Soft skills are not about what exactly you do at work as a specialist, but about how you work. For example, “soft skills” include the ability to plan time, resolve conflicts, convey your thoughts to the interlocutor, empathize and listen to other people.
In turn, hard skills are professional knowledge, what is taught at the institute and in courses. For a designer, a hard skill would be the ability to work in Photoshop, for a translator, knowledge of the language.
It is impossible to be a good programmer without being able to write code, but it is also difficult to advance in your career without soft skills. Research by the Society for Human Resource Management and Mercer proves that the better a person’s soft skills are, the more successful they are at work.
Another way to call soft skills is “human skills”. Many mechanical tasks can be performed by a computer, but in order to resolve a multi-level conflict, inspire team members or console an upset colleague, developed human qualities are needed. Experts from the World Economic Forum seriously say that soft skills are the main advantage of a person who does not want a robot to take his job.
What are soft skills?
There are a lot of “soft skills”: the Lominger competency model alone identifies 67 (!) qualities. Usually, skills are divided into several groups. The American portal The Balance Careers groups “softs” as follows:
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Communication. This includes everything related to communication: empathy, listening skills, public speaking skills, the ability to tell interesting stories and express your thoughts beautifully, the ability to work with text.
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Critical thinking. Skills that help analyze a situation and make informed decisions: risk assessment, creativity, flexibility, logic, ability to learn, tolerance for change, ability to cope with difficulties.
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Teamwork. The ability to be an important member of a team and value colleagues is another category of “soft skills.” It includes the ability to give and receive feedback, work with objections, the ability to set personal boundaries, understanding business ethics, time management, social hygiene, and a high level of emotional intelligence.
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Positive attitude . Confidence, energy, ability to work together, humor, friendliness, enthusiasm.
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Work Ethic : Caring for others, following directions, independent, punctual, self-reflective.
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Leadership . A great leader is someone who leads and at the same time allows each member of the group to reveal their potential. They will need such skills as the ability to delegate, take and offer help, conduct difficult negotiations, the ability to inspire, manage people, projects and teams, including remotely, mentoring skills, the ability to recognize and nurture talent, stress resistance, and so on.
The classification may be different. At Yandex Academy, for example, soft skills are conventionally divided into universal and those needed by the manager. Your employer may have its own system.
How to evaluate which software needs to be improved
While “hard skills” are easy to name and measure, “soft skills” are harder to assess — even after talking to a person at an interview, you can’t always tell how creative or stress-resistant they are. Here’s how to get to know yourself a little better.
Methods of professional recruiters
Hogan test . A multi-stage questionnaire is used to determine a person’s motivation, strengths, and “dark” aspects of their personality that may manifest under stress. Such a test may have a couple of hundred questions, it may take more than an hour to complete, and the results are interpreted only by specialists.
“360 degree method” . The employee is assessed by several people at once – the manager, colleagues, recruiter and even the test subject. Based on this, an analysis of the main strengths of the person is carried out. All competencies are measured on a scale with a certain number of points, and then the arithmetic mean is calculated. It is important that this method is not an assessment, based on the results of which you can, for example, promote or fire an employee, but simply one of the ways to obtain information about soft skills.
Self-assessment method
Here’s how you can independently assess which soft skills you have developed and which ones are not so well developed.
1. Determine what “softs” you need. Community Director of the IKRA Innovation School Danil Morozenko suggests turning to the real labor market for this. Find several “dream vacancies” in companies that you like and where you would like to work now or in the future. Study the requirements for candidates – in addition to hard skills, the employer indicates the necessary soft skills. Make a list of everything you come across.
2. Create a “skills octopus”. This method is described by the author of the course “Project, People and Self-Management” Nikolay Toverovsky. Try asking yourself how developed this or that skill is in you and rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is not developed at all and 10 is very well developed. The resulting picture will clearly show which points or “legs” lack points – these are the ones that need to be improved.
To evaluate the “softs” more fully, ask for feedback from others. Send the table to a loved one, classmate, colleague, friend, or even your boss and ask how they rate your mastery of a particular skill. If you compare their ratings with yours, you will get something like a “360-degree method.” Some discoveries may be unpleasant — sometimes others do not see us in the same favorable light as we do ourselves — but the picture will be more objective.
3. Choose a few key skills. Don’t set a perfectionistic goal of getting all skills to a “ten.” It’s more realistic to choose 1–2 of the most critical points and focus on them.
In free form, describe why you need a specific skill, why it is important in your work, and what difficulties you have with it. For example: “I can’t defend my ideas to my boss. I get confused and end up agreeing with him, even when I know he’s wrong.” This will help formulate clear goals.
How to develop soft skills
Having chosen “software”, gain a theoretical base. Here is how it can be done.
Books
There are many publications devoted to the development of each of the “soft skills”. For example, Martin Anthony and Richard Swinson in the book “Don’t Try to Do Everything Perfectly. Strategies for Fighting Perfectionism” help to increase stress resistance, “Rice Storming” by Michael Michalko teaches to think outside the box, and “Do It Tomorrow” by Mark Forster explains how to manage time wisely.
Lectures and podcasts
This is a good way to learn specific techniques and life hacks to improve soft skills. There is a lot of free content on TED – for example, here is a short lecture on time management, and here is a whole playlist on negotiating.
The creators of the podcast “The Best Version” invite experts to discuss pumping up soft skills, “Theory and Practice” talks about self-development using convincing examples, the guys from “What if it doesn’t come in handy?” explain in simple terms how to apply soft skills in practice. There is a lot of interesting and useful stuff in the Lifehacker podcast – for example, here is an episode about how to develop leadership qualities.
Courses
If time allows, you can take a full course. And it doesn’t have to be paid — for example, GeekBrains has a free course on delegation, and on Netology you can find, for example, a video on how to resolve conflicts at work. The free Open Education platform offers lectures on courses in social psychology , leadership and conflict management . Many courses can be found on Coursera — by a specific request like time-management or by a general request soft skills.
Blogger James Clear advises not to get stuck at the theory stage and move on to practice as soon as possible. If you decide that you need to improve your teamwork skills to build a career, join a joint project, become a volunteer, organize a book club or organize a green swap. After the results, ask the participants or leaders of the project to review your work – feedback helps you evaluate progress, see mistakes and grow.