‘Soft skills,’ what comes to your mind first when you hear this term? It could be your communication skills – verbal and written, your time management skills, or your team spirit.
Soft skills are not just limited to interpersonal skills, but they also include your character traits. “What kind of traits?” We heard you ask. Let’s see the list of skills and traits that are considered soft skills.
- Communication
- Creative thinking
- Adaptability
- Dependability
- Teamwork
- Professional ethics
- Time management
- Critical thinking
- Problem-solving
- Positivity
- Self-motivation
These are the types of soft skills that employees require and employers seek in almost every field of work. But what are soft skills? Let’s understand the meaning of soft skills.
What are soft skills?
Soft skills refer to communication skills, interpersonal skills, and personality traits that enable one to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people.
In simple words, soft skills are the skills and traits that help you think, act, and interact effectively in your personal, professional, and social setting.
But why do employers stress so much about soft skills?
Importance of soft skills
- Career growth
You must have noticed employers include soft skills in the ‘requirements’ section of almost every job role these days. It shows how vital soft skills are to progress in your career.
According to the survey done in 2017 by the iCIMS Hiring Insights, 94% of recruiting professionals believe that employees with strong, soft skills have a better chance of being promoted to leadership roles.
This belief of the recruiters themselves sheds light on how soft skills are essential for you to direct your way on the leadership path.
- Customer demand
Today, customer service and satisfaction have gone to a whole new level. Clients and end-users value a wholesome experience, business representatives, and brand professionals who listen to their problems and empathize with them.
Soft skills such as active listening, communication, empathy, team collaboration, and problem-solving are valued more in modern customer support. After all, this is what leads the client or the end-user to have a fruitful experience turning them into happy customers.
- The future is soft skills
The recent COVID-19 has fast. Forwarded the world into the era of robotics and automation. When most of the work will be done by machines and humanoid robots, why would you need strong, soft skills?
Well, when artificial intelligence takes on your hard tasks, it’s your soft skills that will become a key differentiator to secure your job.
Deloitte Access Economics predicted in its recent study that by 2030, soft-skill intensive roles would occupy two-thirds of all the jobs.
- Hard to automate
“How will soft skills make a key difference in the era of artificial intelligence?” you must be thinking, “can’t these skills be automated just like everything else?”
Well, soft skills refer to your interpersonal skills as well as character traits that are hard to automate. No doubt, the demand for employees with stronger soft skills will only increase at the workplace.
And in the near future, if you hear or see artificial intelligence taking part in soft skills, it will help employers and organizations teach and track the improvement of soft skills in their employees.
Now that you have understood the importance of soft skills from a bigger perspective, you might want to know the benefits of soft skills in your daily work life.
Here are the visual benefits of stronger soft skills that you can experience in your daily life.
- Improved and increased workplace communication
- Improved teamwork
- Improved productivity
- Improved leadership
- Increased employee satisfaction
- Increased client retention rate
Suppose you haven’t already started working on your soft skills. In that case, these benefits will be the essential boost for you to start focusing on your soft skills and improve your presence and relations to lead a better and satisfying life at work and on your personal front.
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