What are soft skills? Learn how to improve your personal and professional life

2023-06-14 21:37:42

Soft skills can help you improve your personal and professional life and open many doors. Find out here what these skills are.

Last update : June 14, 2023

Today, there are a large number of highly qualified professionals in various fields. This is great news, but it’s also a factor that makes it difficult for organizations to make a clear decision when hiring. It has thus become necessary to emphasize more human skills: soft skills.

These are skills that are related to being and emotional intelligence. Find out here what these skills are and how they can help you professionally and personally.

What are the soft skills ?

To better understand them, it is necessary to be very clear about what skills are. It must be said that this is a concept that has multiple interpretations.

However, these interpretations have one thing in common: skills are linked to knowledge that can be developed through training. In other words, they refer to the level of mastery of one or more specific tasks that you can acquire.

When these skills have to do with technical and academic knowledge, we then speak of hard skills. Here are some examples :

Spelling
Expression orale
Web programming
Accounting management
Proficiency in a second language

Now let’s get to the heart of the matter: soft skills. These skills are related to emotional intelligence and how to relate and interact with others. Although in recent years there has been an emphasis on these types of skills, there is no way to quantify them, but there is a way to identify them.

Among the soft skills that stand out the most in the work environment are the following:

Direction
Negotiation
Communication
Attention to detail
Team work
Analytical thinking
Relational capacity

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The big 5 soft skills

THE soft skills cited are the most requested. Nevertheless, other researchers have worked on a broader concept and have identified 5 soft skills essentials:

Openness to new experiences: this skill goes hand in hand with curiosity and an artistic spirit.
Responsibility : this skill has a direct association with success.
Extraversion : this skill is present in people who are confident, full of energy, kind and sociable.
Affability: this skill refers to people who are flexible, sensitive, tolerant, modest and indulgent.
Emotional stability: it results in the absence of sudden mood swings and appropriate emotional reactions.

Why do the soft skills are they important?

Soft skills are not only important in the work environment, but also on a personal level.

In the first scenario, they complement any specialized or technical skills. They make professionals honestmaking them stand out among the large number of candidates who can apply for a vacancy.

In addition, these skills are taken into account for possible development. For example, when talking about a position focused on team management, not only experience will be taken into account, but also leadership, group management, assertive communication, decision-making and flexibility. .

One who masters both hard skills et soft skills will excel much more.

On a personal level, the absence of soft skills negatively affects the way a person can relate to others. Socio-emotional ties require very specific human capacities for healthy coexistence.

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How to value the soft skills ?

Contrary to hard skillsTHE soft skills develop from the experience of personal and professional experiences throughout life. This includes lessons learned from trial and error, which are also of great value.

Furthermore, the research highlights the need to create spaces for the development of relational skills during university training. It is recommended that institutions include this type of teaching, in search of greater organizational well-being and minimizing the margin of resignation.

Another way to develop soft kills is to play employee games at company meetings. Participants can identify their level of self-learning, self-efficacy and analytical ability, as well as their skills in teamwork, leadership, decision-making and problem-solving.

Finally, another way to develop these skills is to accompany a person who already has the seeds of good hard skills et soft skills. Mentoring and coaching come into play here. The mentor or coach already has the characteristics that the apprentice wishes to develop.

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All cited sources have been thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, timeliness and validity. The bibliography for this article has been considered academically or scientifically reliable and accurate.

Agut, S. & Grau, RM (2001) A psychosocial approach to the study of competencies. Social project: Labor relations magazine, ISSN 1133-3189, No. 9, pages. 13-24
Gomez-Gamero, ME (2019). Soft skills competencies for the new millennium. DIVULGARE Scientific Bulletin of the Superior School of Actopan, 6(11). https://doi.org/10.29057/esa.v6i11.3760
Matteson, M. L., Anderson, L., & Boyden, C. (2016). ” Soft skills”: A phrase in search of meaning. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 16(1), 71-88. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/609811/summary
Rasipuram, S., & Jayagopi, D. B. (2020). Automatic multimodal assessment of soft skills in social interactions: a review. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 79(19-20), 13037-13060. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11042-019-08561-6
Schulz, B. (2008). The Importance of Soft Skills: Education beyond Academic Knowledge. NAWA Journal of Language & Communication, 2(1).