SOFT SKILLS
Soft skills are essentially known as people skills - the non-technical, intangible, personality- specific skills that determine one's strengths as an effective leader, listener, negotiator, and conflict mediator. "Hard" skills, on the other hand, are more along the lines of what might appear on one's resume - your education, experience and level of expertise.
Soft skills is a term which also refers to personality traits, social graces, facility with language, personal habits, friendliness, and optimism that mark people to varying degrees.
Soft skills play a significant role in one's success in life particularly in one's profession. They help one to excel in the workplace and their importance cannot be denied in this age of information and knowledge. Soft skills in the highly competitive corporate world will help you stand out in a crowd of regular job seekers with ordinary skills and talent.
The ever-changing impact of technology and the style of management pay so much attention to soft skills. Recent survey suggests that the more valuable employee is the one who can grow and learn as the business changes and grows.
Soft skills play an important part for the success of an organization. Organizations, particularly those dealing with customers face- to-face are generally more prosperous if they train their employees to use these skills. With the boom in outsourcing taking root across industries, many professionals and subject matter experts directly dealing with their clients on a regular basis, soft skills have become absolutely essential for the success of the organizations and the individuals.
Soft skills are as important as traditional hard skills to an employer regardless of industry or job type. It is to be understood clearly that soft skills complement hard skills. At the same time hard skills cannot be replaced with soft skills.
"Soft skills are very important in business. It is essential to be technically
sound, but one should also have the ability to convey the idea to the masses in the simplest possible manner." "Planning is necessary but execution is also equally important. And it takes soft skills to execute any idea because it involves dealing with people directly."
For this reason, soft skills are increasingly sought out by employers in
addition to standard qualifications.
Soft skills cannot be taught. However it can be developed through proper training. Majority of the managers observe that they could find workers who have "hard skills" but many potential job seekers lack the "soft skills" that a company needs.
Wishing you all the best
Team Smart Workforce