It is said that good hard skills on your curriculum vitae will get you the job interview. It is the soft skills you have in presenting your answers, ideas, and arguments which will land you the job and that is why most recruiting managers and agencies look for both hard and soft skills in an employee. While hard skills are job-specific skills acquired through education and training, soft skills, on the other hand, are interpersonal skills which influence communication skills of a person, social graces and how you interact with fellow employees, management, and clients. For example, a professional corporate mc must have incredible soft skills to hold a room together at a conference.
Hard skills are easily quantifiable through certification and are quickly evaluated and defined. Soft skills are also known as emotional quotient are harder to define and assess, and this is why a soft skills training is required to ensure that all employees understand and polish the ones they have. This is important because, for effective application of hard skills, soft skills must be fine-tuned since the two go hand in hand. For instance, the ability to collaborate and work with colleagues well and to get things done through other people differentiates between a great professional and an average professional.
Soft skills training targets areas such as critical thinking, teamwork, communication, leadership and work ethic among others. Below is a short discussion of each ability;
Critical Thinking
Employers like employees who can analyze a situation and come up with informed decisions on their own without unnecessarily bothering the management. Critical thinking training covers areas such as creativity, flexibility, research, adaptability, problem-solving, logical thinking, troubleshooting, inventiveness among others.
Teamwork
The ability to negotiate and work with others peacefully while appreciating diversity is important in every organization. Soft skills training on teamwork covers areas such as empathy, dealing with office politics, disability, and diversity, collaboration, customer service, networking, persuasiveness, dealing with difficult personalities and situations among others.
Communication
Every job requires speaking with people whether via phone, letter or in person and this should be done respectfully and politely. Also being an excellent communicator requires being a good listener for you to be able to give adequate feedback. Communication skills training covers areas such as non-verbal communication, negotiation, verbal communication, listening, persuasion, presentation, public speaking, writing of reports and proposals, visual communication, storytelling and body language reading.
Leadership
Though your job description may not include a leadership role, employers would like to know whether you can rise to the occasion when duty calls. Leadership involves making of executive decisions and managing of people and situation. This training will cover areas like project management, conflict management, and resolution, meeting management, decision making, deal-making, talent management, supervising, inspiring, facilitating and mentoring.
Work Ethic
People with good work ethic tend to finish their assignments on time, stay organized and focused and follow instructions even though they can work independently. These people are the pride of their employers. Work ethics training will teach fields such as time management, discipline, self-motivation and monitoring, reliability, resilience, train-ability, persistence, independence and multitasking among others.
Since soft skills build on hard skills, for effective output by the employee’s employers should invest in these soft skills training for a dynamic workforce.
