Soft skills are the combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, emotional intelligence, and personality traits that make it easy to get along and work harmoniously with other people.
Soft skills can be taught, but they’re not as straightforward as hard skills: those specific qualities and skills that can be clearly defined, measured, and taught for success in a job.
The Soft Skills Gap – Do You Have One?
When your workforce has lots of technical skills but an absence of soft skills, you have a soft skills gap. Soft skills are what accompany the hard skills, and help your organization use its technical expertise to full advantage.www.iibmindia.in
- If you’re really good at getting clients, and not so good at retaining them, chances are you have a soft skills gap.
- If you have lots of staff turnover and have to keep retraining people, chances are you have a soft skills gap.
- When you have lots of managers but no real leaders – that’s a soft skills gap.
In fact, whenever you are unable to capitalize on the wealth of knowledge, experience and proficiency within your team, then you should be assessing the level of communication and interpersonal skills that are present in your organization.
3 Soft Skills You Need to Achieve Career Growth
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is often referred to as the ability to recognize and manage your emotions and the emotions of others. It’s made up of four key elements:
- Self-awareness
- Self-regulation
- Motivation
- Empathy
It might not sound like the most important skill for job growth and success, but in some cases, it is. In an analysis of new employees who didn’t meet expectations during the first 18 months on the job, 23% failed due to low emotional intelligence.
Team Player Attitude
The ability to play well with others is a soft skill you’ve been working on — unknowingly — since your first day of pre-school or daycare. You might not have known it when you were fighting over blocks or figuring out the rules of a made-up game, but you were actually preparing for a lifetime of workplace collaboration.
Openness to Feedback
This is part of emotional intelligence, but especially when it comes to the workplace, being open and able to receive development feedback is critical to success at a job — especially a new job.
Think about it: Constructive feedback helps you do the best job you can, and if you take it personally or react defensively, you aren’t able to hear the feedback and adapt it to your current strategy.
