What are Soft Skills? Definition and Importance

Today, success in the workplace requires more than just technical expertise and knowledge — otherwise known as hard skills.

In addition to these “hard” skills, we also need “soft” skills. These skills allow us to work with others effectively. No matter what your position, organization, or industry, you work with people. Taking time to build effective soft skills can contribute to a more efficient, more harmonious, and more productive workplace, as well as to your own overall job happiness and satisfaction.

Soft Skills refer to the personal attributes, such as communication, teamwork, problem-solving, and time management. As you may see, soft skills are conspicuous for its difficulty to measure or quantify.

For instance, In gamer slang, a skill is a character’s abilities: healing, buffs, shielding, special attacks. This meaning of the word is more often used in RPG games.

While hard skills reflect your personal capabilities at work, soft skills help you successfully interact with colleagues, customers, partners and solve or even avoid difficult situations and problems.

Let’s take a closer look at soft skills and talk about what skills are needed in IT and how to develop them.

Communication

Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn CEO) with reference to conducted research, said that developers, being a pro, lack communication and argumentation skills.

One would think, talking, having long conversations or answering questions are basic skills that every person obtains, but. These skills aren’t taught in school or university and sometimes it’s easier for a specialist to write 100 lines of code than to get their idea to the client, especially if the conversation is held with a person not from the IT field.

How to gain.

Practice makes perfect. No matter how trivial it may sound, fear won’t go away if you remain silent and avoid any communication. You can find people like yourself and organize debates on similar topics. Also, try to find something useful in literature.

Anti-toxicity

A toxic and scandalous specialist is a headache for any manager. Conflicts in the team, rude attitude towards clients, constant showdowns – not a single business has yet led to prosperity, so the employer would be better off rejecting such a candidate, even to the detriment of improved hard skills.

And for a second, a non-conflict specialist does not equal a spineless one. This is someone who is emotionally mature.

“If you lose control of yourself, you have lost everything,” Robert Bakel said.

Analytical Thinking and ability to Overcome Obstacles

In theory, these two skills must be separated, but actually they are complementary and it is more appropriate to link them.

The ability to solve complex problems and cope with emotions when unexpected situations arise is crucial. When working on small projects, you may face frequent changes in requirements from the customer.

Imagine a situation – release in a month, and today the PM says that the product must be different.

Your task is not to panic; you need to think of what stage you are at, what can be changed and what needs to be created anew. With these skills, you will be able to analyze the situation, predict the consequences and return to the customer with a “cool head”, offering several options.

Teamwork

It is one of the most in-demand skills in development. A couple of years ago, recruiting company Hays conducted a survey, the results of which showed that the ability to work in a team ranks first among soft skills in the list of employer requirements. And many employers are ready to turn a blind eye to the lack of some technical skills if the candidate meets the soft needs.

Especially if you are a DevOps engineer

Trainability, self-organization and ability to convey researches

The IT sector is very dynamic and the willingness to learn quickly will be simply necessary in order not to miss out on something new. Continuing this point, it will be useful for a specialist to be able to find answers to his questions without assistance as well as use new resources and tools for self-study.

Time-management

Includes planning, organization, self-discipline and control over tasks, as well as the ability to prioritize more important tasks.

We are used to being distracted by social networks, notifications, emails and sometimes it is impossible to focus on what is important. 80% of employees work with open messengers, as a result, labor efficiency decreases and what is planned for the day can be completed by half, or even less.

How to gain?

separate personal and work time
learn how to make plans efficiently
give up bad habits – muttering at your colleagues behind their backs, getting stuck on tiktok for “n” minutes
reduce stress level – your brain can not function properly if there is a constant thought about an unfinished task, you must leave work at work and let yourself relief stress at the weekends
replaying “I won’t make it” in your head will only help you burn out faster and plunge into a pool of negativity at work – so you must concentrate on things that you can benefit from
quality rest. If you work well, you must rest well. It’s come as a surprise, but a bunch of people don’t know how to rest and what to do apart from work.