Why Soft Skills Matter for Career Success, and How to Develop Them

Recently, a survey among employers in the US found that “problem solving” was rated the most important skill for any employee to bring to the job. In the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Job Outlook 2020 survey, a whopping 91.2% of respondents rated the possession of problem solving skills the most crucial attribute in any potential employee. 

This is an example of what is generally termed in the workplace as a “soft skill.” Soft skills can also be defined as non-technical or not job-specific skills. They refer to personality traits, a positive outlook, social skills, communication, and other personal competencies that boost an employee’s fit for and performance on the job.

Hard Skills v/s Soft Skills

Soft skills can be differentiated from “hard” ones, specific for a given job responsibility. For example, for an information technology employee, hard skills can include software programming languages, database skills, cloud computing, or project management.

For Finance/Accounting related roles, these could be GAAP, or IFRS, or FP& skills. For a recruiter’s job, it would the ability to carry out talent sourcing and talent acquisition. 

We can carry out our basic job responsibilities if we have our respective Hard Skills. However, it goes beyond merely being able to carry them out. Because employees are expected to excel at the job. Even so, excelling at these isn’t nearly enough in modern work landscapes. Here is where having soft skills is crucial opening doors for the next levels of our careers and continuously growing our careers.

“Soft skills” is simply a term relating to various personality traits and positive characteristics. These include interpersonal skills & social graces, communication skills, and other competencies. The competencies not only improve the performance on the job but enhance an employee’s overall relationship, both internally and externally.

Imagine an excellent programmer who wrote excellent code to improve the business logic. However, he failed to present it properly to convince the teams involved. That’s an overall failure despite doing an excellent job, just because of the lack of soft skills.

A small example of soft skills in this article

Let’s take a break here and go back. In the previous section we mentioned “We can carry out our basic job responsibilities if we have our respective Hard Skills.”

Please note that we did not mention: “You can carry out your basic job responsibilities if You have the required Hard Skills.”

This is an example of a soft skill. We should avoid sounding like preaching because preaching creates resistance. By avoiding words like “you” or “your,” we can remove, or at least minimize, the resistance to the acceptance of advice. Even for an advisory article such as this one, nonjudgmental language is important in creating acceptance, ensuring that the reader reads on!

Types of Soft Skills, their Importance, and how to Develop them

Industries where soft skills are most valued include consumer services, retail, human resources, and facilities services. However, soft skills are absolutely necessary in any job for career growth. Especially in today’s global and knowledge economy, employers have realized that gaps in soft skills can jeopardize their businesses. Managers can see that productivity can be limited when there is a lack of soft skills.

Other desirable skills rated highly in the survey include the ability to work with a team (86.3%), a strong work ethic (80.4%), written and verbal communication skills (77.5 and 69.6%, respectively), and leadership (72.5%). These are also the qualities that most companies look for. Other examples of soft skills include initiative (69.6%), flexibility, adaptability (62.7%), etc. 

Developing and Leveraging the Soft Skills

Ok then, so we are armed with this knowledge that soft skills are critical. Now, how do we make sure we develop these skills. And not just develop but leverage them to ensure that they help us get ahead in our careers?

Developing soft skills can be a long, drawn-out, and sometimes even uncomfortable process. It has to start by acknowledging that we might need to change some things about ourselves. Let’s face it, all soft skills boil down to our personalities.

Are we critical thinkers? If we would prefer to leave others to lead on any given issue, we need to work on our problem-solving and leadership skills. Do we like being around people? If we are introverted and prefer to work alone, getting along with a co-worker team is another soft skill we may want to work on. Not great at writing reports or speaking up in meetings? Verbal and communication skills 101 is for us. 

Developing these soft-skills requires:

A desire to learn something new

No one can force us to do anything. A learning mindset is the first step towards acquiring new skill sets. Soft skills can be learned. We need to be realistic and set achievable short, medium- and long-term goals for ourselves.

Finding opportunities to practice your newfound skills

Do we need to work on our teamwork skills? It may seem unrelated to our career, but playing on a sports team offers us the best and most immediate lessons in working together to achieve a goal. If it helps us see how team dynamics work, we’re on our way to understanding how to get along with our colleagues.

Seeking feedback

Seeking periodic feedback from our managers and peers can play a vital role. And it’s not just about taking the feedback but about positively accepting it. Taking the initiative to go above and beyond what we are tasked to do is the next step. Remember, developing soft skills is a slow process, but we can decide to take our career down a different path today.

Listening

It’s easier said than done. But learning to really listen also counts as a soft skill in itself. Listening without judgment or criticism is not just an indicator of high emotional intelligence (EQ) in an employee, but listening can also help us hone leadership skills.

Confidence

“Come on,” we can hear you say. “My anxiety issues are enough to deal with; how can I find the confidence even to begin to develop these so-called soft skills?”.

The way we think of ourselves is essentially how we create our stories. Even if we don’t believe it at first, we can describe ourselves in terms of the soft skill we want to acquire. “I am a good problem solver” or “I am flexible and adaptable.” In this way, we may grow into this story we have mentally created for ourselves.

There are many things we can teach ourselves. We can do this just by putting some conscious efforts and practice. If you say to yourself, “I am flexible and adaptable,” you may be asking whether you acted with flexibility or not? Whether you try to adapt or not? And with this, every next situation will become better.

Soft Skills and Career Growth

Developing soft skills also comes with an added perk. When the promotions come our way, we may be better equipped to deal with the added responsibilities of higher management. These would help us in avoiding the pitfalls of the Peter Principle.

The Peter Principle theorizes that once-rising stars in organizations tend to perform poorly at higher management roles. And very often, it has a lot to do with whether these employees possess the requisite soft skills – leadership, problem-solving, and communication skills.

Soft skills aren’t necessarily taught as part of credit courses in colleges and universities, but maybe they should be. With AI and automation taking over so many roles once filled by human workers, soft skills have become increasingly important for hiring managers. This can be seen in the results of the 2020 NACE survey, as mentioned above. They may be the last barrier in the workplace that separates us from the machines.