Soft Skills For Your Employability

In today's job market, having the technical skills required for a position is not enough. Employers are increasingly looking for candidates with strong soft or interpersonal skills. These skills enable you to communicate, collaborate, and work well with others effectively.

While hard skills are necessary, soft skills are often the critical factor in whether or not you get hired or promoted. Soft skills enable you to build strong relationships, resolve conflicts, and navigate the ever-changing workplace landscape.

But how do you get employers interested in recruiting you? What makes you unique? And how do you prove that you possess the soft skills employers are looking for?

In this article, we discuss the essential soft skills which employers recognise are invaluable to their organisation and how you can develop them and demonstrate your competence in these skills.

Most people think that soft skill training doesn't matter for their business or career. They're wrong! Soft skill training is essential for success in every field. It helps us solve complicated problems, deal with change, cope with stress, be resilient, be flexible, stay motivated, and learn new things.

We distinguish between hard (technical) and soft (social) skill sets.

Hard skill refers to the easily measurable knowledge, abilities, and competencies required to perform a specific task. Soft skill refers to the behavioural and interpersonal qualities required to get along with others.

What Are Soft Skills?

Characteristics such as empathy, integrity, honesty, and respect are called soft skills characteristics. They're considered complementary to hard-skills characteristics, which refer to a worker's technical expertise; Sociologists may also refer to soft skills as social skills, which are critical skills for your career journey.

Communication skills

Excellent communication skills are essential for every employee or leader. The range of communication skills needed is critical to your future success.

• Non-verbal communication skills are those that do not require words to convey meaning. These skills include gestures, facial expressions, eye contact, posture, touch, and body language.
• Oral Communication Skills are all about words. It includes oral communication, such as talking to someone over the phone, face-to-face discussions, interviews and presentations.
• Active Listening Skills It means fully concentrating on what is being said rather than simply hearing the message.
• Public Speaking is about a speaker presenting information to an audience. They often speak about a topic that is relevant to their audience. Speeches can be to a live audience and increasingly by video link such as zoom. Cover various topics, including education, entertainment, or influencing audiences. Visual aids such as PowerPoint presentations are often used to complement the speech.
• Writing Skills include grammar, punctuation, spelling, and sentence structure. In addition, writers must be able to write well and communicate effectively so that their messages will reach their intended audience. They may also need to understand how to use different media formats, including emails, websites, blogs, and social networks.

Empathy

Is one of the core skills needed to be a good manager. A good manager listens to his team members and understands what they need. This can build loyalty and help create a sense of belonging. Being able to empathise with your employees means being able to connect with them and understand their wants, desires, and problems. In addition, listening helps us learn about our co-workers to better relate to them. If we don't get to meet new colleagues, it can be challenging to establish relationships.

Delegation

Delegating effectively means knowing how processes work. Therefore, managers must understand how the system works to become effective delegators.

Before starting any project, you must first create a strong foundation for success by establishing a solid support system. Then, be there for your teammates whenever they need you. Remember, delegating is not dumping a task on someone; it's giving them responsibility and trust to succeed.

Outstanding leadership inspires people to be their best and guides them along the road. Challenges and new possibilities create a productive and empowered team.

Flexibility

Adaptable leaders see change as an exciting challenge. They understand they must be willing to try new things to stay relevant. The change will inevitably impact our working lives, so why not make it positive? Helping your employees embrace new opportunities will create a culture where everyone feels respected and valued.

Teamwork skills

Creating a culture where everyone agrees on what must be done is essential. With a good understanding of the people involved, you'll be able to deal with any potential conflicts that might occur.

Teamwork can be complex when working with others. Each person must be a team player and know their role and what he needs to do to contribute effectively. A clear goal should be set and communicated so that each member knows where they or fit into the larger plan. Communication channels should be open and used to communicate clearly and efficiently. Tasks should be delegated to those who are best suited to perform them. Progress should be reviewed regularly to ensure everyone is performing their parts adequately. Ineffective performers should be identified and corrected immediately.

Companies should praise their employee's accomplishments. Leaders be an example for others to follow. But on the other hand, employees should feel free to depart if they feel dissatisfied with the company's culture.

Critical thinking skills

Analytical skills, creative thought processes, and clarity are required when tackling challenges, and you can get support from people with different skill sets within your team.

Leadership skills

Leaders can create a positive work environment, motivate their employees, create an environment where people want to work daily, and manage a team effectively. In addition, a leader needs to communicate well, set clear goals, understand when to let go, and know when to take charge.

Soft skills are essential for success at any career level.

Soft skills are vital to success in any career. They can make the difference between an average employee and an outstanding one. Technical skills and specialist knowledge are essential but aren't enough to get ahead in today's competitive world. As a result, employers increasingly recognise developing their employees' soft skills in such areas as communication, teamwork, and leadership in their organisation.

Recruiters look for candidates who have shown they're capable of leading others. They may ask about your previous experience or what you did before joining their company.

Communicating effectively with others is essential for any business owner or employee. It helps them be better at their jobs.

Salespeople need soft skills and interpersonal communication abilities to succeed. Likewise, customer service representatives need organisational and empathy and listening capabilities.

Team members should know the importance of soft skill development to improve their work effectiveness. They should also know that these soft skill attributes are essential for employees who want to move up within an organisation or business.

Automation Makes Soft Skill Development Even More Important

As technology continues to advance, we'll start seeing more and more job losses due to automation. While this may seem scary at first, it means that we'll need to focus even more on developing our soft skills. These include skills such as communication, problem-solving and critical thinking.

Accenture Strategy released a report titled "Harnessing Revolution". According to the report, companies must help their employees upskill themselves so they don't lose their jobs to automation.

While these reports show that we're heading towards a future where humans will be less needed, it doesn't mean we won't still need specific skills. For example, we'll still need leaders, communicators, problem solvers and creative thinkers. We'll still need to develop our soft skills if we want to survive in the future, no matter what automation is introduced to the workplace.

The importance of Soft Skills in your Career Development

Soft skills are essential to your success in any career. You may already possess many of these skills, but if you don't, you'll need to develop them through practise and training.

Soft skills are invaluable to employers because they make candidates more engaging, communicative and helpful teammates. Without these skills, you might struggle to communicate effectively with colleagues and customers, which makes it challenging to build rapport and trust.

Employers look for soft skills in potential employees because they believe these skills make you a better candidate overall. A recent career survey found that 88 per cent of hiring managers consider soft skills among the essential qualities of a candidate.

It would be essential for you to focus on developing these skills because they are vital to your long-term success. For instance, today's workers spend less face-to-face time with co-workers than ever. Instead, they rely heavily on email, instant messaging, texting, social media and video conferencing to stay connected.

Soft skills like written communication, interpersonal relationships and leadership abilities are becoming more crucial to our careers.

So, whether you're just starting your career path or some years down this pathway, now is the perfect time to build your soft skills.

How to Include Soft Skills on your Curriculum Vitae (CV)

Human Resources recruiters tend to agree that you don't necessarily need a dedicated skills section in your CV to list your soft skills. Before starting your job application, you need to study the job description for the job-specific skills required for the job role.

Once you have a clear understanding of the skills required, you can start to introduce your list of employability skills you need for the role:-

Consider how your soft skills are transferable to this new role. For example, to demonstrate your soft skills, you can use phrases like "communicated effectively," "led projects," "created innovative customer-facing solutions," and "resolved issues." These phrases show that you can communicate clearly and creatively, demonstrating your interpersonal skills.

Your soft skills can also be demonstrated by including a professional summary that includes phrases like "communication skills," "problem-solving skills," "team-building skills," and "time management skills." These phrases show that your soft skills are used in a professional setting.

Recruitment Interview

You have reached the job interview phase in the recruitment process, and how do you demonstrate your proficiency in using your transferable skills in the potential new job role?

Most recruiters would recommend using the S-T-A-R technique to demonstrate your skills during the interview process.

The S-T A-R technique asks a multiple-choice question where each answer has a different score.

• Situation: Describe what happened.
• Objective: Describe how you tackled the problem and what the objectives were.
• Action: Describe the actions you took to achieve this result.
• Conclusion: Conclude with the results of your actions.
• 
  

Following this technique, a structured response to a behavioural-based interview question ensures you do not lose direction in your response to the question.

In conclusion, soft skills aren't just nice to have; they're essential to having a successful career. Studies show that employers consistently rank communication skills among the top three qualities they look for in job candidates. So whether you're applying for a promotion in your current company or a position at another company, developing these skills will put you in a powerful position for your future career.

But even if you already have strong communication skills, it never hurts to brush up on the basics. There a numerous resources you can use to enhance your skills, from online access to a range of soft skills courses. A valuable read to improve report and email writing, read books like "How to Write Letters That Get Results" (by John F. Kennedy) and "The Elements of Style" (by William Strunk Jr.). These books cover topics such as grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure, which will help you write clear, concise messages that get across exactly what you mean.

And if you'd instead focus on improving your interpersonal skills, check out books like The Art of Charm (by Neil Strauss), The Charisma Myth (by Kevin Trudeau), and Influence (by Robert Cialdini). These books teach you how to connect with people through conversation, persuasion, and flattery. By learning how to master these techniques, you'll become a more engaging person who commands respect and admiration.