#BusinessEducation Your guide on soft skills: how to make pe | Idea factory
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Your guide on soft skills: how to make people like you
Whatever your job is, soft skills are necessary for everyone. If you want to get on well with your colleagues, clients, and chiefs, soft skills are essential. Employers especially value those who possess them. So, let’s learn how to master them.
What is it?
Soft skills are abilities referred to how you work and interact with other people. Unlike technical or ‘hard skills’, soft skills are interpersonal and behavioral tools that help you work well with other people and develop your career.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to acquire soft skills on a training course: they are formed in our childhood and develop throughout life. Soft skills are correlated to our emotional intelligence. Employers look for soft skills in candidates as these abilities are hard to teach and important for long-term cooperation. Therefore, they are particularly valuable when applying for a job.
What soft skills to improve?
• Problem-solving
If something goes wrong, you can either complain or take action. This skill helps cope with difficulties at work. The more you master it, the more easily you will tackle your problems.
How to develop: define the main problems in your life, set a deadline, and think of 20-30 solutions to them.
• Effective communication
Communication helps build contacts in order to accomplish professional tasks. It includes business communication and presentation/oratory.
How to develop: communicate with your ‘target’ more. It can be client negotiations, presentations, or lectures. Join oratory classes.
• Project and self-management
To create a website, build a house, arrange a journey — all these are projects. People gather around projects, like clients, assistants, or contractors. The person who manages a project is in the heart of the system.
How to develop: present your current tasks as projects. Set aims, deadlines, and stages. Reflect on how you can optimize them: get more profit or save resources.
• Critical thinking
This is an ability to process information in a well-considered way. It helps verify information, see the correlation between factors, think rationally, and make right choices.
How to develop: work on your logic and observation. Define your colleagues’ behavior role models at work. Watch them react to new information. Learn to ask questions.
• Customer focus
This is an ability to quickly identify your audience’s needs and wants in order to give the most benefit. The skill helps compete at the labor markets. In a country with a developing economy customer focus skill is particularly valuable.
How to develop: analyze your target audience. For instance, if you apply for a job, these are HR managers and company heads. Think of the problems with candidates they might have and try to solve them.
What soft skills do you find the most valuable? Share in comments
