The education system in our country sets you on a skill learning path to acquire hard skills which are essentially the technical skills you require to perform your job effectively. In the process, the importance of soft skills for a stable career gets neglected.
However, it shouldn’t be a surprise for you to know that recruiters today do look for, and times give more importance to soft skills in a candidate.
Soft skills are exactly the opposite of hard skills, which are tangible and quantifiable. These are personality traits and interpersonal skills that directly affect your relationship with the people in the company.
The soft skills are some of the most difficult competencies for people to understand, define, demonstrate or recognize. These are extremely fluid and personalized characteristics of individuals that help employers distinguish between several job candidates.
All the career advice you have received till date about reading your books right or cramming all the formulas stands at the edge with the increased importance of soft skills in the professional environment.
So, to commence your successful career in the corporate world you must pay focus to the importance of soft skills and try to acquire a few.
Understanding hard skills vs. soft skills
As the name suggests, soft skills aren’t very clearly shaped or measurable like the hard skills which can be learned, practiced and mastered with time like dentistry, carpentering or photography.
Soft skills are essentially the elements of your personality that determine your behavior with people in the office which can’t be acquired at any skill learning session.
Hard skills are specific to jobs like web designing skill is important for webs designers and nobody else in the office. Soft skills can serve you in numerous occupations as they are flexible and universally valued.
Unlike hard skills, there are no professional tests or certificates to acknowledge your soft skills or boast about on your resume.
In cases where one employee avenges the other and can’t find a way to reconcile, no amount of hard skills can stitch the gap. Here is when you realize the importance of soft skills to establish a common ground for both employees to work together peacefully.
Have you harnessed your soft skill set yet?
It’s time to seek the right kind of career guidance to use and enhance your soft skills and impress your recruiters with them at the interviews.
Well-rounded, highly developed soft skills can be invaluable to business success. While they can hard to acquire, the importance of soft skills is undeniable for the corporate success.
Importance of Soft skills
Some of the soft skills like interpersonal skills, good communication power, professionalism and leadership qualities are some of the many soft skills that add value to your overall performance at an office. Let us understand how.
Hard skills are useless without soft skills
In most jobs, technical skills alone don’t make the deal for you. For instance, a salesperson with a great deal of knowledge about the products won’t sell well if he doesn’t have the right interpersonal skills to impress the buyer.
Good interpersonal skills not only help in closing client related deals but also help establish right communication channels with team members, superiors and juniors at work.
This establishes a great importance of soft skills in your career.
Soft skills are hard to learn
Hard skills can be taught, learned and perfected over time. Soft skills are more challenging to learn because there is hardly anything to do with knowledge or information; they are closely related to personality characteristics.
Hard skills may look impressive on the CV but soft skills essentially make your candidature stand out at the job interviews.
The evolving modern workplace
The modern workplaces are more about collaboration, cooperation, and co-development than competing with each other.
The importance of soft skills reflects the ability to work in large teams and put you as a strong team player.
A healthy work environment is a product of collective soft skills possessed by employees.
Customers seek compassion
In 2018, if you don’t treat your customer right, somebody else will.
For modern day consumers, low price and competitive advantage is easy to find but good customer service is seldom available.
The soft skill like the ability to converse and influence the customers in an acceptable manner is what closes the deal while transacting.
The future is collaborative
With the popularization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, most human jobs will become redundant in the future.
Thanks to cutting-edge technology, the jobs that require technical skills are on a decline which inflates the importance of soft skills as the key differentiator between organizations that offer similar products.
So, the future is full of hope for those with great soft skills, others can find their way into unemployment.
Soft skills on the resume
Soft skills like communication ability, leadership, creativity, collaboration, and adaptability, positivity, problem-solving and working under pressure can be easily projected on your resume.
You must back these with a sufficient number of examples in the form of projects, presentations or quantifiable instances.
If you’re not exactly sure where to place this valuable information on your resume, you must seek professional help from Resume Buddy.
It is the most advanced offering, by Aspiring Minds, to create a professional-looking resume in a few minutes.
The Resume Buddy provides 25+ aesthetically pleasing design templates, a choice between professional levels and impressive vocabulary to get that on-point resume. Along with a great resume, Resume Buddy also creates impressive cover letters to pack your job application process.
A good resume is the first step towards a potential job opportunity so you must invest time and effort in creating an impressive one with Resume Buddy.
Begin with a skill assessment check for the next possible job opportunity and prepare yourself better by using all your hard skills, but definitely not sidelining the importance of soft skills.