Two colleagues work in the same company: John and Stephan. They studied together at Coll, got similar jobs together, they both have good professional skills and perform their work in roughly the same way. And now it’s time to give one of them a promotion. From now on Stephan is more involved in negotiations and makes important decisions. A newcomer was hired in his former position, while John continues to perform his basic technical duties.

Why is this so? Simply put, Stephan has good communication skills: he can handle complex situations, solve conflicts and creatively avoid problems. That is, besides professional skills, he has well-pumped flexible soft skills. This includes all these features of a specialist.

What Are Soft Skills

A good professional usually has a high level of hard skills, i.e. skills that a person from another field cannot show. Programmers should ideally know programming languages, accountants should be able to balance a balance sheet, betting experts have to use the most efficient analytical tools for calculating results of games at the online sportsbook, designers should be able to work in graphic editors. Swap them around and they won’t be able to do anything. That’s why hard skills come first.

But all other things being equal, a person with well-developed soft skills wins. They are related to the ability to communicate and find compromises, to make decisions, to propose new solutions. Every job, except for lighthouse keeper, is somehow connected with communication. We are constantly communicating with colleagues, clients, and partners. Even a hermit programmer who doesn’t like to communicate has to do it regularly to constantly provide himself with orders. Soft skills help work efficiently and build a career and even be more confident in your hard skills. Technologies are rushing forward, the acquired knowledge quickly becomes outdated, so the workers who not just learned everything, but can quickly adapt to the changing realities come to the forefront.

Soft skills are not an invention of the 2010s. If you think about it, they have always been there: from Ancient Sumer to today, it’s just that they weren’t emphasized before. In the last 50 years, with the development of scientific knowledge about management and governance, they were isolated, given their own name and began to think how to turn this phenomenon in their favor. And, in fact, several important facts have been deduced.

Main Types of Soft Skills

The list of soft skills isn’t so big, but their development for an individual can take over a year. Globally, soft skills are divided into several large groups.

Communication Skills

• The skill to establish contact and dialog with different people: peers, supervisors and subordinates, as well as clients and contractors.
• The skill to argue one’s position in negotiations.
• Business correspondence skills.
• The ability to formulate ideas, present oneself and the company.
• General logicality of actions, ability to draw conclusions from conversations.

Social Skills

• Teamwork, understanding your role and ability to switch between your roles.
• Making connections within the team, positioning oneself.
• Conflict management, finding a way out of extreme situations.
• Emotional intelligence.
• Respectful and ethical communication with all participants in the process.

Self-management

• Time and resource planning skills.
• Management of one’s own self-project.
• Ability and desire to learn and develop.
• Self-motivation, maintaining oneself in a workable form.
• Adaptability and stress resistance.
• Self-knowledge, determination.

Management Skills

• Micromanagement.
• Ability to analyze and forecast results.
• Decision making and responsibility for decisions.

Research Skills

• Curiosity and a broad mind.
• Creative inquiry.
• Searching for information and resources to solve problems.

How to Develop Soft Skills

It’s important to realize that soft skills aren’t character traits. A manager in normal life can be a silent person, but if a designer delays delivery of a project, a manager with developed soft skills should inform the designer that it’s necessary to deliver the project.

Soft skills are related to human qualities (meticulousness, neatness, intelligence), but on closer inspection they turn out to be a confident ability to work independently and effectively within the scope of one’s position. It’s a method of effective application of human qualities, which has a quite specific monetary expression. So in essence it’s a professional skill that is given less attention than hard skills. Since it’s a professional skill, it can be developed.

But to figure out where to go, you have to decide what to develop. Ask yourself a few questions:

• What activities in your work are difficult to do? If you have tried to do it, then it is an important quality for the profession.
• How fast is the industry you work in changing? Adaptability is always important in the labor market.
• What is valued in the professional community? What trends do you see and why them?
• People with what skills have been more successful than you? There’s always a Chinese person who does something better than you.
• Is career important to you at all? Or maybe to hell with those soft skills?

By answering these questions, you can come up with a rough list of skills that will help boost your position and pay. Once you know what and how to develop in yourself, you can pick methods to do so.

This work can be done centrally, with goal setting, strategy and timing, or it can be done playfully. In fact, much depends on your personal qualities and level of motivation.

Tools and Methods for Soft Skills Development

There are several ways:

• Trainings and courses. Their peculiarity is that you develop under the guidance of a mentor. It’s better if it’s a course with feedback.
• Self-learning through books, video lectures, and trainings without feedback from a mentor. Many methods help develop agile skills. Choose the skills you desperately need right now and look for lectures and books on the topic. Almost any subject has its own world-renowned experts.
• Trial and error method. Sooner or later you will have to go out into the fields with new skills and try all those techniques and schemes. You can take feedback from friends, colleagues, family members on how comfortable they feel with you.

Actually, no one forbids combining all these methods. Moreover, they should be combined and eventually put into practice. Information will come to you from different channels, and you can make sure that all these tips work in practice.

There are some basic techniques for developing soft skills:

• For creative tasks — puzzle solving, creative hobbies.
• For goal setting and decision making skills — SMART goal setting techniques, Descartes square, and Eisenhower matrix.
• For research skills — SWOT analysis, different ways of analyzing the market, behavior, etc.
• For management and teamwork skills — quests, orienteering.

Using Technology to Develop and Assess Soft Skills

As a rule, a person can identify slippages in his their soft skills, but sometimes this requires testing.

Actually, almost every skill has its test, and it’s easy to find it in a search engine. As you gradually pump up the skills, you can take the tests over and over again to keep track of the results.

Sometimes flexible skills are needed in a job interview. You’d be surprised, but a large number of skills can be tested by asking a child’s wit problem. Observation of the candidate plays a big role here: how he reacts, whether he asks questions, whether he tries to google the solution, whether he thinks out loud, and so on. HR managers at large IT companies often offer such tasks to quickly determine the level of soft skills.

The Importance of Soft Skills for Personal and Professional Success

It’s obvious that having soft skills has an impact on career and personal life:

• A high-level professional with soft skills can achieve great career heights, otherwise he will remain an average performer with a glass ceiling in income.
• A small businessman or freelancer without the ability to communicate, take responsibility and work creatively will not survive at all. Soft skills are maximally valuable in the small business market, and if complemented with good professional skills, they guarantee growth and success.
• When working in a large corporation, soft skills are often relegated to the background because the company structure allows you to hire simple performers. But taking a good place is only possible with worked out soft skills.

When recruiting, the higher the position (especially management positions), the more attention is paid to soft skills. When recruiting line staff, hard skills are more important, but that doesn’t mean that soft skills are overlooked.

Last Updated on August 13, 2023 by soubhik