Mastering Soft Skills: Your Ticket to Career Advancement
In today’s highly competitive work environment, any advantage you can have during the hiring process will give you a leg up on other candidates. While technical skills and industry-specific experience are great, they are no longer competitive advantages and will not ensure career success. Departmental managers, HR directors, and business owners seek prospective employees with strong soft skills.
What are soft skills?
Soft skills are those interpersonal skills or behaviors we use to interact and communicate with business colleagues, family members, friends, and other people we meet and engage with daily. Soft skills are often called "people skills." They help you work well with others, adapt to new situations, and solve complex problems. Soft skill mastery is vital for anyone interested in advancing their career, and the importance of soft skills crosses all industries, business sizes, and levels of professional expertise.
Soft skill examples.
Communication
Communication skills are essential to building interpersonal relationships in both your personal life and career. They help you express your thoughts clearly and effectively, engage in active listening, and appreciate the value of other peoples’ viewpoints.
Three tips for developing communication skills:
Practice active listening.
Use clear and concise language.
Freely accept feedback.
Emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence describes a person’s ability to understand and manage their emotions and feelings, empathize with other people, and recognize their effect on others. Your ability to understand yourself better, build strong relationships, and work together at every level of your company’s organization is critical to successful career advancement.
Cheryl O'Donoghue's book, How to Be an Emotionally Intelligent Leader (While Crushing Your Goals), presents excellent examples of emotional intelligence. Cheryl featured me in her book as one of 21 business leaders with emotional intelligence superpowers. Learn more about me and my emotional intelligence superpowers in Chapter 21.
Three tips for developing emotional intelligence skills:
Focus on self-awareness and social skills.
Practice active listening and be empathetic.
Take responsibility for your actions.
The World Economic Forum collected job data from 29 countries and regions around the globe, revealing in their Future of Jobs Report that emotional intelligence is a critical skill and consistently listed among the top 10 emerging skills worldwide.
Leadership
Leadership skills are crucial for career development. In addition to proving that you are ready to take on more significant responsibilities within your organization, practical leadership skills can help you motivate others, make strategically important decisions, and successfully manage your team.
Three tips for developing leadership skills:
Set specific goals and communicate effectively.
Delegate tasks and responsibilities.
Inspire others with your actions.
A study conducted by professors at Harvard University, Boston College, and Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan found that training in soft skills like communications, teamwork, and time management helped businesses generate productivity gains to such an extent that they produced a massive 256 percent net return on investment.
Time management
Time management refers to how well you prioritize tasks, complete projects, meet deadlines, weigh competing priorities, and work efficiently. While a critical soft skill in the workplace, effectively managing your time can help you navigate all you have to do outside the office.
Three tips for developing time management skills:
Set realistic goals that you can achieve but require you to stretch your abilities.
Learn the difference between those things that are important vs. urgent.
Understand how to say no to low-priority tasks.
Adaptability
Adaptability is the ability of a person to not only quickly adapt to changes, learn new things, and accept uncertainty but to know how to react when adjustments are required. Like leadership skills, adaptability is another skill you must master to advance in your career. The average person has 12 jobs in their lifetime, requiring new skills, different working methods, and different products and services to sell. You must adapt to changing requirements to succeed at each job.
Three tips for developing adaptability skills:
Be open to change and embrace new challenges.
Be willing to take risks and learn from failure.
Embrace feedback.
Teamwork
The ability for employees to work together as a team is critical for any business to be successful and is a crucial skill managers look for when hiring new employees. Teamwork is the ability to work with different individuals—building relationships, collaborating, communicating effectively, preventing conflicts before they arise, welcoming feedback, and being willing to take on changing responsibilities as needed.
Three tips for developing teamwork skills:
Respect and appreciate diversity in all forms.
Do whatever is required to achieve common goals.
Be open to feedback.
Conflict resolution
I’ve already mentioned that your ability to be an effective collaborator or team player helps prevent conflicts before they arise, but that doesn’t mean you will never experience conflict. Conflict resolution is handling and resolving disputes successfully, maintaining a positive work environment, and ensuring collaboration and productivity.
Three tips for developing conflict resolution skills:
Learn to manage your emotions.
Seek out common ground.
Collaborate on solutions.
Creativity
Creativity is developing new ideas, thinking outside the box, inventing, innovating, and transforming. It empowers you to unravel complex problems, recognize opportunities when they arise, power innovation, and produce new products and services.
Three tips for developing creativity skills:
Seek out new experiences and explore different perspectives.
Cultivate a curious mindset and take risks.
Practice brainstorming.
Critical thinking
Critical thinking is analyzing, interpreting, deducing, and explaining information with open-mindedness and problem-solving abilities. Critical thinking helps you assess situations and make decisions rapidly and effectively in today's fast-paced business climate.
Three tips for developing critical thinking skills:
Collect and analyze data.
Assess diverse arguments.
Make decisions based on evidence.
Soft skills vs. hard skills. What's the difference?
Unlike soft skills, hard skills are abilities, expertise, or knowledge an individual has collected over time and commonly relate to a specific job or industry.
Because hard skills can be taught and learned, a person can easily demonstrate that they have the skill they say they have. For example, if you must speak French to apply for a position at a translation company, you will likely need to prove your fluency in the French language.
If you must understand the intricacies of the court system to work for a law firm, the hiring manager asking you questions about how courts operate will uncover whether you have the knowledge to do the job.
Here is a list of soft skills we've already discussed and a list of hard skills so you can more clearly see the difference between the two.
Soft Skills
Communication
Emotional intelligence
Problem-solving
Leadership
Time management
Adaptability
Teamwork
Conflict resolution
Networking
Creativity
Critical thinking
Hard Skills
Technical training
Language translation
Industry-specific expertise
Computer programming
Data analysis
Writing and editing
Accounting or finance
Project management
Engineering
Manufacturing
Marketing and sales
What are the benefits of soft skills to career success?
Soft skills are one of the cornerstones of your career success, even if you aren’t aware of it right now.
Incorporating soft skills into your arsenal of professional abilities will help position you as a valuable employee with meaningful relationships, a leader who can effectively manage people, and help the company achieve its strategic objectives.
All other things being equal, demonstrating these soft skills can give you an edge over other job candidates or receive a promotion over current colleagues.
Good communication skills can help you prevent conflicts before they arise and establish confidence and trust within your team.
Better teamwork can help you work effectively with others and build unified and resilient teams.
Stronger leadership skills enable you to inspire people, resolve conflicts, and make hard choices.
Increased productivity lets you complete tasks more efficiently and achieve your goals more effectively.
Enhanced problem-solving skills help you develop fresh and innovative solutions to complicated issues.
These soft skills not only enhance your value but make you a more well-rounded, appreciated, and indispensable employee.
Is it worth putting soft skills on a resume?
The short answer is yes. It is worth putting soft skills on a resume. They are becoming increasingly important to employers, and it is more likely that in a hiring situation where two candidates have equal experience and the hard skills to do the job, it is often the inclusion of the soft skills on the resume that will give that candidate the edge.
A study conducted by the International Association of Administrative Professionals (IAAP), OfficeTeam, and HR.com reported that 67% of HR managers said they would hire an applicant with strong soft skills whose technical skills needed to be improved. Only 9% would hire someone with strong technical experience but weak soft skills.
According to the US Department of Labor, companies have identified the following soft skills as the key to worker success in the 21st-century workplace.
Networking
Enthusiasm
Professionalism
Communication
Teamwork
Problem-solving and critical thinking
Adding soft skills to a resume can help you stand out from other candidates who may only highlight their hard skills. It demonstrates your ability to work well with others and take on additional responsibilities, demonstrates your leadership qualities and growth potential, and aligns with your potential employer's priorities.
How do I list soft skills on my resume?
Adding soft skills to a resume can be tricky. You want your skills to stand out, but you don't want to necessarily create a bold, highlighted “soft skills” section that includes a simple bulleted list of words like communication, teamwork, time management, and problem-solving.
A good option is to incorporate your soft skills into your work experience by highlighting how you effectively used your soft skills and the successful outcome you achieved, if applicable.
Here is an example:
Work Experience
Marketing Manager
CompanyCo, Inc.
May 2019 to Present
Collaborated with cross-functional teams to develop and implement successful marketing campaigns across three distinct product brands. (example of teamwork soft skill)
Analyzed and wrote new product messaging to enable the sales team to adapt quickly to changing market demands and customer preferences, ensuring continued sales growth. (example of adaptability soft skill)
Managed weekly inter-departmental meetings to communicate product updates and launch milestones to staff and management. (example of communication soft skill)
Led a team of four marketing professionals whose responsibilities directly increased sales by 20%. (example of leadership soft skill)
Including soft skills in your resume will help showcase your abilities, differentiate you from other candidates, and demonstrate your value to prospective employers.
Top Tip
Review job posts on employment websites like Indeed.com, ZipRecruiter.com, Monster.com, and others that interest you to identify the soft skills employers seek. Then include in your resume your soft skills that align with the job requirements.
Soft skills are equally important whether you are a junior staff member or senior executive looking to advance your career. They are an investment in career advancement, help build your professional reputation, and drive productivity, effectiveness, and business profits.
Here are some soft skills training resources to help you build the career you want.
LinkedIn Learning – LinkedIn Learning provides a variety of courses, videos, audio files, and learning paths presented by industry professionals on all areas of soft skill development.
Coursera – Coursera offers soft skill courses from prominent universities and industry-leading corporations.
Udemy – Udemy’s online learning platform delivers courses on all aspects of soft skills, from the fundamentals to expert-level strategies.
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