With new technologies, this question is raised among students and young people who are starting their professional careers: “Is there room for me?”
The answer is “yes”. There are abilities inherent to the human being that cannot be replaced by a machine and that are essential for achieving business objectives. These are known as soft skills and they are those skills that every professional who wants to boost their career needs to develop. Do you want to know what these skills are and why they are so important?
Why is it important to learn soft skills?
In the professional field, we usually talk about two main types of skills: soft skills and hard skills. Soft skills are those attitudes and skills that favor co-existence and communication in the professional environment, while hard skills are those skills that can be acquired through training and professional experience and that usually have a practical application.
2020 Workplace Learning Report identifies the top-priority skills for success and advancement at work. All of them are soft skills: leadership, creative problem-solving, and communication.
We are highlighting the importance of developing these skills, because “companies today want employees who can solve difficult challenges and come up with creative and innovative ideas that technologies cannot replicate.“
Emotional and social intelligence
The soft skills most valued by the business world can be included in three large areas of knowledge: emotional intelligence, social intelligence and cognitive processes.
In other words, to be competitive in the labor market, a good professional must know how to do, know how to think, and know how to learn.
- Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify one’s own emotions and those of others, and to know how to use that information to guide individual and collective thinking and behavior.
This ability also involves the control of emotions to adapt to changing environments in order to achieve certain goals.
Within the broad spectrum of abilities inherent to emotional intelligence, leadership, creativity, and personal productivity stand out.
- Social Intelligence
The concept of social intelligence refers to the ability of people to learn from processes of failure and success.
It also includes the ability to relate to others in an assertive and empathetic way, and to manage changes at a collective level.
Influence, negotiation and communication are the skills most valued by the professional world within the field of social intelligence.
Why soft skills are important to students in preparation to a future professional career?
The 7 soft skills you need to boost your career
Developing and enhancing your emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and cognitive skills will help you boost your professional career, regardless of your field of study and your area of expertise.
As for soft skills, these are the 7 most valued skills in the world of work:
Leadership
Getting to know each other and knowing what are the main strengths and points to improve is the basis of leadership. It also involves setting and pursuing goals, a practice that will become a tool for excellence and resilience in the face of difficulty.
Having leadership capacity involves having greater determination in conflict management and in the face of the different challenges that may arise.
Creativity
Creative thinking makes possible to find original alternatives, both when faced with common problems and extremely complex contexts.
Creativity implies leaving the comfort zone and maintaining an innovative attitude to generate changes and new ideas.
Personal Productivity
Personal productivity is the ability to be more efficient, that is achieving the best results with the minimum resources. To achieve this, necessary to work intensely to maintain your and others motivation.
To achieve the best results in production processes, essential to have the ability to inspire yourself and others.
Negotiation
It is no longer a question of reaching a beneficial agreement for the interests that are represented. The current value of negotiation is to create a mutual exchange of information and experiences in order to satisfy who involved.
A good agreement must be strategic for all parties, especially in today’s competitive market.
Communication
Communicating implies having good oral and written conditions, but above all knowing how to listen and actively observe, a characteristic highly sought after by recruiters.
Communication is an essential soft skill for teamwork, because it allows you to create appropriate and more convincing responses.
Problem-solving and decision making
The factors that intervene in the decision-making processes are multiple, and this is because the variables come into play more and more.
For this reason, in order to solve problems and make decisions are necessary to develop analytical and strategic skills that allow for defining an action plan that takes into account all these complex and dynamic environments.
What soft skills are important for students on a resume today?
Here are some examples of these skill sets: team work, communication, leadership, critical thinking and creativity. They come up as important skills on most job listings nowadays.
Any employer would be seeking to hire the most qualified person for the job. Communication skills, cooperation for bigger tasks, leadership skills and the ability to manage time efficiently are just some examples of soft skills that people should present on their resume today.
People often put their experience as their main resume trait. However, we will find companies looking to hire an individual from a younger generation would put individual soft skills as an important factor for hiring decisions.
Framing your resume focusing of these soft skills has a higher chance of grabbing employers attention through tough competition for jobs.
Thank you for reading