Soft Skills In The Workplace: What Are They And Why Are They Important.

It is easy for an employer to train new employees in a particular profession such as web design or finance (hard skills). You know it is much harder to train them to be responsible or self-confident. While hard skills are revered in any workplace, employers give importance to soft skills.

So, let’s prioritize and go to the soft skills.

What are soft skills?

It is the synonym for “people skills” describing the personal traits and competencies that characterize peoples’ connection with one another.

Imagine, a teacher who doesn’t have any soft skills such as approachability, attitude or pedagogical skills, her students and colleagues will not highly regard her. Most of the specialists in a business sphere actually care more about soft skills than about technical, coding or analytical abilities. Soft skills help to facilitate human connection and interaction. These skills are much harder to define and evaluate. Examples of soft skills include:

Communication the ability to collaboratively work with colleagues and accurately exchange information and ideas. Effective communication in the workplace avoids confusion, creates accountability and builds a positive company culture.

Adaptability the ability to embrace change and challenges with a positive and resourceful attitude. This skill is especially important if you are working in a technology-driven field or startup, because changes in processes, tools and clients you work with can happen quickly.

Emotional Intelligence understanding and controlling emotions of you and those around you. This skill is essential for effective negotiation as you use the knowledge of emotions to guide your counterpart’s thinking, perspective and actions to achieve better outcomes.

Critical Thinking extracting value from information in the most logical way. It involves identifying several possible solutions, evaluating each one, comparing and selecting the one that is the most promising. Employers prefer job candidates who can solve problems not quickly, but effectively.

Creativity finding innovative solutions to solve problems in the company besides completing the task. For example, you may devise new ways to cut costs during a budget crisis. This brings fresh and new perspectives to the work, which results in company productivity.

Why are soft skills important?

Everyone notices that technical, educational or special professions are necessary to be considered for numerous types of roles. And in most jobs, hard skills are not just enough for workers and CEOs to make a company a great place to work. If the managers are not able to communicate and interact with their co-workers and clients, they may create gaps in their workplace even having a good reputation as a specialist. All specialties require some soft skills to make the hard skills valuable.

Soft skills are a way of saying that everybody should have great skills, which is vital for succeeding in a career as well in life. When your workers have lots of hard skills but no soft skills, you will have gaps in your workplace.

If you are good at getting clients and not so good at communicating and retaining them, you will have soft skill gaps. Even more, having lots of managers but no leaders, it tends to have soft skill gaps in a working environment. A business manager should be able to listen to employees, think creatively and create a great working atmosphere. Soft skills ensure a productive and healthy environment which leads to the success of both the individual and the business growth.