#BusinessEducation Your guide on soft skills: how to be the | Idea factory
#BusinessEducation
Your guide on soft skills: how to be the best team worker 2.0
Soft skills are the key to successful career. No matter what industry you are engaged in, they are highly valuable among all employers. The people with developed soft skills are more likely to become wealthy. Let us tell you how you can do that. If you haven’t read the first part, check it out here!
Definition
Soft skills are a set of personal competences that define how good you are in a social environment. This is not about how well you program or speak Chinese. It concerns your personality traits: the ability to communicate, think rationally, and understand people’s needs. All these mainly depend on our emotional intelligence and logical abilities the we were born with. However, we still can master them to a certain extent.
Here’s the list of soft skills you can improve:
- Non-violent communication
This is a method to clearly convey information and achieve your goals. Within non-violent communication you inform the other person about your observation providing facts, express your need, and formulate a request. This way you will never do any harm to others and satisfy your needs. The skill helps negotiate at group meetings and personal talks.
How to develop: learn to understand yourself and be sympathetic to others. Apply the method on friends in order to practice it. Visit NVC meetings and read our articles.
⁃ Decision making
This is an ability to consciously choose the best option. The skill helps accomplish your goal quickly bringing the most benefit.
How to develop: learn to see the maximum amount of options. Properly set your priorities in any particular situation and select the best option from all the possible ones.
- Emotional intelligence
This refers to an ability to understand and manage your and others’ emotions, drives and intentions. The skill allows to perform practical tasks, make decisions, and build communication. For instance, if you see during the presentation that people are tired, take a break.
How to develop: develop your empathy to yourself and others. Observe your and other people’s emotions. Think over what they are related to and how affect others. Try to control yourself and make the best decisions based on the observations.
- Mentoring
The traditional educational system is rigid and inflexible. There is a gap between competences which we acquire at university and real workplace. In order to grow professionally and adjust to market requirements, you need a mentor. They will help you make a training plan and track your progress.
How to develop: think of the competences you need to work on, and how you can do it efficiently. Make a training plan for a year. Follow it and fix your results. Once you learn to manage your education, offer your colleagues to be their mentor.
- Learnability
This is an ability to learn new information and put it into practice in order to cope with everyday challenges. Managing your knowledge helps pick the necessary information sources, sort it, and control your training plan.
How to develop: make a training plan and get rid of unnecessary information. Choose the knowledge you would like to apply in practice. It’s important to go through any theory or concept and analyze it.
Which one of the mentioned soft skills do you find the most necessary? What would you like to develop? Share in comments
