What Are Soft Skills? HOW THEY ARE IMPORTANT?
Soft skills are the interpersonal skills and good manners which helps you to build a positive relation at your workplace, with your friends or at your college. Soft skills are essential if you are negotiating a brand new contract with your company, introducing new ideas to your colleagues, trying to find a good job and so on. Think from HR and managers point of view who they will hire, a candidate with good technical skills who also knows how to interact with others or a candidate who is equally technically gifted but lacks soft skills. The choice is quite obvious the candidate with good technical and soft skills will get the job. Soft skills are important it will help you stay organized, gaining confidence and in growing a network.
How To Improve Soft Skills
One of the best way of improving soft skills is by observing people around you that can be your friends, colleagues, relatives, managers and so on. You should observe the way they interact with others, how they perform a task, how they complete a task, how they present their thoughts to others and their individual process. It’s important to learn from others these way you can correct yourself if you are doing something wrong. One should always be open to receive a feedback from supervisors, managers and even coworkers. These way you can receive constructive criticism which will help in improving at your workplace and your soft skills. one more way is by finding sources that can help you learn tactics for improving your soft skills . These sources can be reading through books, podcasts or online classes. Some are paid while there are many free sources from where you can learn.
TOP 5 SOFT SKILLS
COMMUNICATION
The ability to communicate well will make it easier to clear the interview process, maintaining a healthy relationship at workplace. Having communication skills also involves knowing how to communicate with different person in different situations. If you want to be good at communication you should be good at following things.
Firstly, you should be good at listening, active listening means paying attention to a person that could be your friend, colleagues, manager while he is speaking and not just pretending to be listening. You can be a good listener by focusing on what the person is speaking, by avoiding distractions and by thoughtfully responding. To follow that you should be confident enough while speaking, you can appear confident by making eye contact or by preparing ahead of time so that your thoughts are clear. You should be friendly with your colleagues. Being friendly will make sure that you maintain a healthy atmosphere around you. By making small gestures such as asking someone how they’re doing, giving a smile when you see them or by praising them for work well done can help you nurture fruitful relationships with both colleagues and managers.
ADAPTABILITY
Adaptability as a skill means the ability to change or adjust to new situation. It implies how you respond when you come out of your comfort zone. It is very important to be open minded as change is inevitable. Since 2020 the workspace transformed significantly and the pandemic showed everyone that if you want to be successful you should be able to adapt to the changing environment. We all saw that sometimes things didn’t go as planned, and things had to be developed quickly to avoid trouble. Adaptability is crucial just imagine if you get a promotion and you have to move to a new place that can be a different state. In these situation there will be different people around you from different culture who speaks different languages during these time adaptability skills will help adjust in this new environment. The best way to approach adaptability is keep a positive outlook and keep on learning new things which will always help you in your future.
TIME MANAGEMENT
If you have proper time management skills then you are able to finish a specific task in a specific time frame amidst challenges which will enhance your reputation among your seniors and you can make progress at your workplace. People who can manage time effectively tend to get extra time in their everyday life which they can spend with family , friends or other personal pursuits.
For proper time management you can prioritize task based on their importance, set a time limit for completion of task by doing so you can be more focused and structured. Ensure that you start everyday with clear impression of what you need to do for that particular day. Consider making it a routine that you construct a checklist for the next day by doing so you hit the ground running the next morning. Its very crucial that you maintain flexibility in your schedule, sometime a task might taker longer then you expected so make sure that you keep some time space to adjust if such circumstances arises.
CRITICAL THINKING
Critical thinking is a process how an individual or a team can solve a problem or analyze a topic based on the relevant information they have. It helps you and your colleagues brainstorm new ideas while working on a project which can prove essential in manufacturing a productive outcome.
How to become a critical thinker? First thing is to identify the problem, this involves looking at problem from different perspectives. Secondly, you have do the research regarding the problem. These process involves collecting data from various sources and verifying that the data which you have collected from different sources is relevant to your problem. The next think is be open minded, critical thinkers should be unbiased while making a decision. The last one is identifying the best solution, Your solution need to be creative and innovative. There might be more then one solution to the problem so be open minded to multiple solutions these will help you think critically.
TEAMWORK
Teamwork is crucial at workplace as it grows communication within your team which prevents conflicts within organization and it also increases efficiency of the work to perform the tasks which helps to produce the best outcomes. One of the most important factor is team interdependent. Cooperation among teammates not only helps in solving problem but also makes people confident and maintains high level of trust.
For a team to be successful each member of the team should be creative, innovative and should have different point of view. Team members should be able to make high quality decision and everyone in the team should be respected. Every member of the team should be given a chance to present their ideas, opinion and solution to the problem. It helps in finding best possible solution for a problem.
CONCLUSION
Soft skills are as important as technical skills, there is no end point in improving soft skills. You can be very good at your technical skills but if you don’t work on your soft skills you wont be able to get success at your workplace. It is one of the most common reason for not getting a job or for not getting a promotion. So, to get real success at work place soft skills and technical skills should complement each other.
