While it is easier to define and quantify hard skills, soft skills are intangible but hold a lot of importance in determining whether you would get the job or not.
Most companies shortlist candidates on the basis of their technical skills but when it comes to the selection process for non-tech job profiles (even if the company is into IT industry), it is based primarily on the soft skills you possess. Therefore, it is important to master certain soft skills for a successful career.
That is why today we are here with a list of top 7 soft skills that you should focus on to ensure a successful and rewarding career.
Communication skills
Communication skills are not only about rousing speeches and long syllables. Good communication skills consist of understanding the audience and modulating your voice and tone accordingly. It also consists of understanding things easily and being able to communicate ideas and thoughts effectively.
A good way to build your communication skills would be to read books and newspapers. This will help increase your vocabulary and make you more confident. The second thing that you can do is speak with someone whose communication style you admire and try to adopt their mannerism and language.
Team player
Being a team player is a virtue these days and is highly recognised by all the big and small organisations. Any organisation needs its people to work together, with minimum conflict and understand each other. If you cannot work in a team, then you would be of little or no use to the company.
So, invest in team activities like cricket or football to get a better understanding of how to be a good team player and develop this most important of all soft skills.
Problem-solving skills
One of the major soft skills that employers look for is problem-solving skills. Of course, you need to be critical and analytical to be a problem solver but that is not it. You also need the attitude to look at a problem and try to think of a solution rather than give up in the face of it.
To test a candidate’s problem-solving skills, recruiters often ask ‘situational questions’ to see how they would react to it and the approach they would take to arrive at a solution.
Also, you don’t necessarily have to come up with the solution to every problem every time. However, you should try and look at all possibilities before giving up.
Adaptability
Adaptability is an important soft skill that can really take you far in your career. With the ever-evolving tech world, you need to be smart and adaptable to learn new things quickly.
Also, in a job, you would need to adapt to a lot of things and situations and you should be ready for them. Things might not always go according to a set plan, and you need to be ready to manoeuvre your way through it or accept it.
Being flexible is important if you want to taste success in the long run.
Creativity
One of the most undermined soft skills, creativity is often misunderstood for being artsy. You don’t always have to paint poetry to be called creative. Creativity in general workplace is being resourceful and thinking out of the box.
Creativity is the requirement of every job profile and will get you noticed. So, work on your creative juices to have a super successful career.
Leadership
You might be a fresher looking to start his first job or you might already have a job and not given a lot of thought to leading from the front. However, if you want to succeed in your career, then you cannot sit in the passenger seat forever. Sometime or the other you would have to move to the driver’s seat.
And, to be ready for such a time, you need to build on your leadership skills and be clear about what you want.
Getting into unnecessary conflicts is not the sign of a leader. To cultivate your leadership skills, you need to keep an open mind and accept others opinion while giving your own. You should be ready to take important decisions and have a team that would trust you through it.
Self-motivation
People with strong work ethics, and who truly love the idea of working are highly valued everywhere. As such, self-motivation emerges as one of the most important skills that you should work on to have a successful career.
Self-motivation is not just about doing your work on time but also exploring your work and taking initiatives. It also includes being reliable.
Soft skills are important to build and grow your career. As such, you should start working on your collection of soft skills from the word go. The right soft skills will take you places and also help you ace the jobs uploaded on the AMCAT jobs portal with ease.
[…] Soft skills make for a very important section in any resume and help you not lose yourself in a sea of candidates with similar skills and educational background. Key soft skills that you can include in your resume are – teamwork (something that the recruiters really seek in an employee), problem-solving skills, great communication skills, etc. Read: “Top 7 soft-skills you should master for a successful career” […]
[…] pressure, and hence many interviews are stress interviews. It is in such a situation that you can display your soft skill correctly. One of the common job interview tips we offer is to go through a mock interview so that […]