Soft Skills

What Are Soft Skills?

Soft skills relate to a person's behaviour, personality, character traits and interpersonal skills. These skills characterize a person's relationship with other people in the workplace. Soft skills are a complement to hard skills, which correlate to a person's knowledge and occupational skills.

Soft skills are non-technical skills that define who a person is and how that person works rather than what they know. These skills encompass the character abilities that decide how well a person interacts with others in a workplace and usually are a part of an individual's personality.

Soft skills alone will not get you a job. Still, if you can demonstrate that you have the right combination of hard skills and soft skills, this will place you in a higher position of getting a job. So the greater the number of skills a person has, the higher the demand for their services. Recruiters and hiring managers typically look for job candidates with soft skills that complement their hard skills, which can make that candidate more suitable and successful in the workplace.

Types of Soft Skills

Soft skills include personal attributes, personality traits, and communication abilities needed for success on the job. Soft skills characterize how a person interacts with others.

Soft skills include:

• Communication
• Creative thinking
• Work ethic
• Teamwork
• Time management
• Motivation
• Problem-solving

How to Assess Your Soft Skills

Unlike hard skills that are achieved through education and training, soft skills are acquired through life and work experience. They are a part of personality relating to sentiments, attitudes or expertise, etc. These skills enable a person to "understand" others. These are much harder to learn, at least in a conventional classroom. They are also much harder to measure and assess.

That said, some job skills courses do emphasize soft skills. They may address soft skills, to help job seekers understand what they are and the importance of highlighting them on their resume.

If you've been working for a while, probabilities are you've already developed certain soft skills. For instance, if you have worked in retail, you've worked in a team environment. If you've attended to unhappy customers to find a resolution, you would have used conflict resolution and problem-solving skills.

When applying for a new job position, you need to address the appropriate soft skills you may have developed. For example, instead of just discussing problems, you have recommended solutions to those problems, this means that you have problem-solving skills. Similarly, if you see a co-worker struggling and you offer to assist, means that you have teamwork or collaborative skills. As another example, if there's a process workplace and you suggested ways of improving it, means that you have creative thinking skills.

If you are new to job seeking or the workforce, consider other activities you have done in the past, either throughout schooling or on a volunteer basis. Probabilities are that you have already developed a lot of skills as you've had to communicate, adapt to changes, and resolve difficulties etc.

Why are soft skills important?

Now let's look at the hard skills and soft skills combined and what they mean when you apply for a job.

You have learned the "hard skill" of building and construction over the years with practice and experience you have acquired a "soft skill" by improving the method to speed up the building process.

A recruiter or a potential employer will assess you as an experienced builder that has the hard skills for the job with the soft skills of problem-solving and innovation, from which the business will benefit.

On the other hand, from the ATS (Applicant Tracking System) search, your skills will be used to match your resume to the requirements of the job advertised. So the more soft skills you have matching to the skills required for the particular job position, the higher your resume rating score will be.

Soft skills play a significant part in your resume when applying for a job. It is very advantageous to match as many soft skills to the job description advertised before submitting your job application for any job position.

However, packing or overpacking soft skills into a resume is not advisable