Both Soft Skills and Hard Skills are relevant to succeed in life. These skills give you the tools to accomplish your goals as a person, as a student or as a professional.
Ten facts about Soft Skills:
Soft Skills are also called “People Skills or Emotional Intelligence.”
They are natural attributes and personality traits.
They are less often taught formally in schools and vocational programs.
They can be developed all through the person’s life.
They are harder to quantify.
They are mainly related to how you communicate with others.
They are related to how you get along with co-worker, managers, customers and vendors.
They are essential for succeeding in today’s workplace.
Also called as “employability” skills.
Soft Skill development adds value to the person, his career and the workplace.
Some essential Soft Skills to live with, most of them are part of your family upbringing:
Communication - Be able to communicate clearly and effectively with others, through oral, non-verbal and written communication (some jobs also require skills in effective public speaking).
Listening - It is a skill that goes hand in hand with excellent communication. Besides expressing your ideas, thoughtfully listen to the opinions of others (Active listening). Make your clients, employers, colleagues, and employees feel like they are respected and valued.
Conflict Management - Need to solving issues among staff members, colleagues, or the client and your company. Listen impartially to both sides and use creative problem solving to arrive at a solution.
Empathy – It is the ability to understand, to listen thoughtfully to the person’s concerns, and express consideration for their issue. Compassion will help you get along with everyone in the workplace.
Leadership - It requires to motivate and encourage others, and help your team achieve success, to be a decision-maker, manage situations and people, and mostly be an inspiring coach and mentor.
Negotiation - to be able to listen to others, use creative problem solving to arrive at an outcome that satisfies everyone. It involves creating formal agreements or contracts between clients.
Positive Attitude - Friendly people, with some rapport with colleagues; eager to work, sense of humour, confident, cooperative, enthusiastic, honest, and with a work-life balance.
Teamwork - Collaboration, to listen to others, to find a common goal, motivation, resolve conflicts, offer the ability to negotiate, to recognise and appreciate diversity and differences, to accept from others feedback, share intercultural competence, Social skills, and with Value education.
Critical Thinking – People able to analyse situations, make informed solutions and decisions, to be creative, flexible, curious, adaptable, with a desire to learn; with logical thinking, who researches, resourceful, who think outside the box, tolerant of changes and uncertainties, resilient.
Work Ethic.- People with robust work-ethic complete tasks on time, stay focused, stay organised, follow instructions, is competitive, dedicated, follow direction, independent, perseverant, punctual, reliable, resilient, results-oriented, self-directed, self-monitor, strategic planning.
Soft Skills can’t be learned by routine, as they involve emotional intelligence and empathy, which often makes them more complicated to convey to students. However, it is possible and worth the effort for institutions to include Soft Skills as part of their curricula. By all means, they are “a plus.”
Ten facts about Hard Skills:
They are part of the skill set required for a job.
They are the expertise necessary for an individual to successfully do a job.
They are acquired through formal education and training programs (college, apprenticeship, short-term training classes, online courses, certification programs or on-the-job training.”
These types of skills are learned and can be thought, defined, evaluated and measured.
They are commonly used to compare candidates’ skills for a job.
They can be tested again for a promotion or a transfer within a corporation.
They include the specific knowledge and abilities required to succeed in a job.
They are the technical aspects of your job.
They are more quantifiable and more manageable to learn.
They are job-specific and are typically listed in job postings and job descriptions.
The following are examples of some of the Hard Skills required for different occupations: Accounting – Marketing – Analytics – Automotive – Banking – Carpentry – Computer – Construction – Data – Logistics – Electrical – Engineering – Financial – Hardware – Healthcare - Information Technology – Languages – Legal – Manufacturing – Mechanical – Medical – Nursing – Pharmaceutical – Plumbing– Programming - Science – Software – Teaching – Translation - Word Processing, just to mentioned a few.
A Hard Skill for a nurse, for example, might be the ability to operate medical tools or the management of patients. In some industries, employers might test candidates’ Hard Skills, to make sure they can do what their resume claims they can do. (ALISON DOYLE, THE BALANCE CARRIERS)
CONCLUSIONS: The main difference between Hard Skills and Soft Skills is that Hard Skills can usually be taught in a series of concrete steps. From an instructor’s or a boss’s perspective, teaching someone how to code is a better-defined process than teaching them to listen and communicate effectively with a client. Focus on Your Most Relevant Skills.
The bottom line is that both Hard and Soft Skills are essential. Once you have both, you'll be able to outperform others and do your job well in the real world. Both need to be taught at schools and institutions at all levels, all the way through the years of Higher Education, and in this way Soft Skills will be developing naturally in individual’s cognitive knowledge, up to the time they will search for a job when they graduate.
Dave Food
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