Soft Skill Development

Soft Skill Development , prerequisite of being employed
Soft skills are personal attributes that enhance an individual’s interactions, job performance and career prospects. Unlike hard skills, which tend to be specific to a certain type of task or activity, soft skills are broadly applicable.

Soft skills are sometimes broken down into personal attributes, such as:

optimism
common sense
responsibility
a sense of humor
integrity
time-management
motivation.
and interpersonal abilities, such as:

empathy
leadership
communication
good manners
sociability
the ability to teach.
It’s often said that hard skills will get you an interview but you need soft skills to get (and keep) the job.

How to improve your soft skills

Soft skills play a vital role for professional success; they help one to excel in the workplace and their importance cannot be denied in this age of information and knowledge. Good soft skills — which are in fact scarce — in the highly competitive corporate world will help you stand out in a milieu of routine job seekers with mediocre skills and talent.

The Smyth County Industry Council, a governing body based in the US, conducted a survey recently. The results of the survey was called the Workforce Profile which found “an across-the-board unanimous profile of skills and characteristics needed to make a good employee.” The people most likely to be hired for available jobs have what employers call “soft skills”.

Here were some of the findings according to the workforce study:

The most common traits, mentioned by virtually every employer, were:

~ Positive work ethic.

~ Good attitude.

~ Desire to learn and be trained.

Mohan Rao, a technical director with Emmellen Biotech Pharmaceuticals Ltd, Mumbai defines a ‘good attitude: “It is a behavioural skill, which cannot be taught. However it can be developed through continuous training. It represents the reactive nature of the individual and is about looking at things with the right perspective. You must be ready to solve problems proactively and create win-win situations. And you must be able to take ownership ie responsibility for your actions and lead from the front without calling it quits at the most critical moment.”
Most of the business leaders observed that they could find workers who have “hard skills” ie the capability to operate machinery or fulfill other tasks, but many potential hires lack the “soft skills” that a company needs.
CEOs and human resource managers said they are ready to hire workers who demonstrate a high level of “soft skills” and then train them for the specific jobs available. The ever-changing impact of technology has given hard-skills-only workers a short shelf life.

People’s ability to handle the soft skills side of business

- influencing
- communication
- team management
- delegating
- appraising
- presenting
- motivating
are now recognised as key to making businesses more profitable and better places to work.
Increasingly, companies aren’t just assessing their current staff and future recruits on their business skills.
They are now assessing them on a whole host of soft skill competencies around how well they relate and communicate to others.
We now find it a bit shocking and somewhat disturbing when someone displays the old autocratic style of bullying management tactics (though we know it is still unfortunately far more prevalent than is desirable). Many companies simply will now no longer put up with it (bravo!). Measuring these soft skills is no easy thing. But in the most progressive companies, managers are looking for people’s ability to communicate clearly and openly, and to listen and respond empathetically. They also want them to have equally well-honed written skills so that their correspondence (including emails) doesn’t undo all the good work their face-to-face communication creates. Good soft skills also include the ability of people to balance the commercial needs of their company with the individual needs of their staff. Being flexible and able to adapt to the changing needs of an organisation also qualify as soft skills, as do being able to collaborate with others and influence situations through lateral and more creative thinking. The ability to deal with differences, multiculturalism and diversity is needed more than ever. Very few companies are untouched by the ever-widening influence of other cultures and good soft skills facilitate better communication and people’s ability to manage differences effectively. Everyone already has some form of soft skills (probably a lot more than they realise). They just need to look at areas in their personal life where they get on with others, feel confident in the way they interact, can problem solve, are good at encouraging, can schmooze with the best of them. All these skills are soft and all of them are transferable to the workplace.
Not only that, the best news of all is that soft skills can be developed and honed on an on-going basis through good training, insightful reading, observation and of course, practise, practise, practise.

According to results of the Workforce Profile, (source: www.workforce.com) the more valuable employee is one who can grow and learn as the business changes.

Soft skills “are as important, if not more important, than traditional hard skills to an employer looking to hire — regardless of industry or job type. This could offer a major breakthrough as educators and training providers seek to develop and cluster training courses to fit business and industry needs.”