Soft skills are personal attributes, typically linked to how you work and interact with others, which are necessary for success and your career development. It also makes it easier to form relationships with others and in turn unlock more career-related opportunities for you.
Regardless of where you work and what job you have, you will need some soft skills, as employers look for people who already have soft skills due to their difficulty to teach.
Here are seven important soft skills you need in the workplace:
1. Communication
Written and verbal communication skills are important for the majority of jobs because they help you interact effectively with all of the people you encounter at work, such as, customers, networkers, traders, colleagues etc, and build strong relationships. You need to be able to communicate well in all platforms: face-to-face, video calls, over the phone, via email etc.
Alongside this is the necessary development of active listening – a technique where you focus on what the other person is saying rather than just waiting for your turn to speak.
2. Teamwork
For a business to function effectively people must work well together in order to achieve a common goal. The quality of work improves when people use their individual strengths and skills together in collaboration.
Some people struggle with teamwork because they believe that they know how to do the job better than anyone else and they do not trust others to do their roles. This can create conflict and hurt the overall effectiveness of the team.
3 Adaptability
When things don’t go the way you thought they would you need to adapt to the situation. The workplace is always changing – there are constantly shifting trends.
Employers will feel more comfortable if they have employees that can adapt to this change and are proactive in learning how to deal with it, such as, attending training sessions or conducting their own research.
Remain positive if there is a change and accept it rather than resist it. Pass your learning on to your colleagues so their transitions are easier. An employee that can work in this way is very valuable.
4. Problem-solving
Most jobs have elements of problem-solving – this is where you think of solutions to deal with a problem. Usually the top performers deal with difficult challenges because they have strong problem-solving skills. This type of creative thinking can lead to improvements within the company.
5. Leadership
You may not be in a leader’s role but employers look for these qualities to determine whether you can make important decisions and manage situations and other people. They want to see whether you can grow beyond the job.
Leadership skills are a mixture of all the other soft skills as you will be able to work independently and within a team but you also take charge and guide the team to work more effectively. Leadership is the skill least developed by yourself which is why many leadership courses exist.
6. Work Ethic
Having a strong work ethic proves to your manager that you believe that work is important because, for example, you are punctual, organised, you meet deadlines, you remain focused etc. It means that you can work independently but also follow orders.
You may even have to carry out jobs below your level of experience but this will only show your employer that you’re willing to get the job done regardless. Having a strong work ethic is usually a natural ability or you may have been socialised to regard it as important.
7. Time management
Trying to do everything at once isn’t an efficient way to work and it can often lead to you feeling disorganised and stressed.
Time management is a way of delegating your time for specific activities.This allows you to manage your workload and time effectively so you can be as productive as possible. You must be able to prioritise your tasks, complete them before they become urgent and know when to delegate certain tasks to others.
Culled from VirtualSpeech
