Soft Skills

Yes, you can learn them! While certain skills come easier to others, there are ways to refine these skills and develop them over time by practising the techniques/tools you learn.

Soft skills make things possible. Tasks can be completed by those with both hard and soft skills, you might think of the hard skills as ‘what’ got done and the softs skills where ‘how’ they got done. And it’s likely, that on reflection of a task, or place you worked that actually those colleagues/employees you remember for getting the job done with positivity, or effective communication, or good leadership skills are remembered by the ‘how’ and not the ‘what’. Furthermore, soft skills are transferable from job to job, and the need for soft skills is not going anywhere! As technology and jobs change, this means that the hard skills will change with them, or the skills you had 10 years ago might have become obsolete. But, the soft skills you carry now can be developed continually and will always be needed.

93% of employers said that Soft Skills are either an “essential” or “very important” factor in hiring decisions (Study from Wonderlic). While it used to be the case that your hard skills (qualifications) were the thing that would get you a job above someone else with similar work experience/credentials, it is now believed that employers look for the soft skills individuals have and value them the same if not more than the qualifications someone else might have.

This will entirely depend on the individual. You might have some skills that you already feel you have but you want to develop some more, or perhaps you really lack good time management and you want to adopt new skills so that you can manage your time effectively.