“Soft skills get little respect, but they will make or break your career” ~ Peggy Klaus
Adopting a progressive mindset should be on your top list if you wish to advance your career in the upcoming years. In this agile corporate world, people continuously pick up on professional skills while failing to get their hands on soft skills. In today’s time, soft skills play an essential role in upscaling your corporate life. I am delighted to present some soft skills you should incorporate into your work life.
- Communication: It is an essential skill for every kind of job. You have to speak with the people, be it clients, employees, colleagues, etc. While speaking, speakers should check their tone, voice modulation, and clarity to ensure better understanding. Communication is essential for you to pitch your ideas and creativity. It also helps in maintaining good interpersonal relationships.
- Listening: In this noisy and chaotic life, people often don’t listen; they want others to listen to them but listening to other people’s opinions is equally essential as listing to your opinion.
- Positive influence: Sometimes, in an organization, people cannot put their best foot in front due to a lack of motivation or inspiration. In such times all they want is someone who can make them believe in themselves and push them through the fence. Influencing people is an art, and people usually lack this skill. The role of a positive influencer is to support people, help them grow in the organization, and be kind and humble toward them.
- Adaptability: As we all have seen, the changes in the work pattern of the companies. During the Covid-19 pandemic, most companies operated online and are now slowly but steadily returning to normal. Adaptability plays a significant role. It helps you to get comfortable with the surroundings and people around you.
- Emotional intelligence: EI is a highly sought-after skill that helps you regulate or manage your emotions and others. It sounds easy, but it isn’t. e.g. an employee who can talk to another employee off a ledge must be of high emotional intelligence.
- Strong work ethic: Ethics is subjective; it depends from person to person. In the corporate world, anyone would want to hire someone willing to take the initiative, reliable, empathetic towards others, and fruitful to the company.
- Humility: The company wants its employees to be humble and honest—one way to enhance or sharpen ourselves is by accepting our mistakes. Be grateful for what you have, and work hard for what you want. Feedback from your managers, asking for help when needed, and following their guidance can lead you to the right path.
The corporate world is practising people skills to engage with the employees and provide a homely office environment. Google, one of the leading companies in the world, has a separate set of soft skills that it looks for while hiring people. Some examples of soft skills required by Google are teamwork, cognitive ability, leadership, humility, etc. Besides Google, top companies across the world have also started practising soft skills and training their employees with such skills.
Inculcate these skills to make yourself more capable for the upcoming years. Professional skills may help you to get the job, but soft skills will help you to ace that job. When it comes to skills, people tend to ignore soft skills but not anymore, as most organizations have started to pay attention to employee retention, work culture, work-life balance, etc.
