It is no longer a secret that technical skills aren’t enough to guarantee you a successful career. Employers are constantly emphasizing the essence of soft skills. Often called people skills or interpersonal skills, soft skills allow you to interact with others in the workplace, enabling smooth collaborations. These skills are best for building strong professional relationships, career advancement, and enhancing productivity.

Let’s explore some of the benefits of soft skills and a few tips to develop them in the work environment.

Understanding Soft Skills

It is critical to understand soft skills and why they matter. A soft skill development plan entails several non-technical abilities that allow you to work well with others.

• Communication. An ability to pass a message clearly in written form or verbally.

• Problem Solving. A skill of knowing and analyzing problems and developing solutions or recommendations.

• Teamwork. The ability to work with others, contribute in a group and resolve issues as a team.

• Adaptability. Having the ability to adjust to changing circumstances, adopt innovation, and develop new skills.

• Time management. The skill of managing time and ensuring all priorities are met within the given timeframes.

• Leadership. The ability to guide others and inspire them to take initiative and achieve more as a group.

• Critical thinking. Critically Assessing information and concepts, making sound judgments, and navigating complex issues.

A firm understanding of these skills is essential because employers highly seek them. Soft skills also improve personal development and help fast-track careers. For instance, Vera has curated a Tech week event list with all the upcoming SF Tech Week events. In the San Francisco Tech Week event, Vera managed to use soft skills such as pre-event planning, making a slack group for networking, and listing all events tech week had to offer chronologically. This is an ideal example of using soft skills in the workplace to make operations smooth and streamlined.

Now, let's look at how to develop such skills in the workplace.

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How to Develop Soft Skills

Practice is the only way to improve your soft skills. It would not make sense to develop leadership skills without having an avenue to try them out in the real world. As an employer, you can create these avenues and assess employees' performances as you go.

Adding interactive elements in the workplace can help develop soft skills. For example, simulations and weekend seminars can help employees better understand how these skills work. You can invest in virtual simulations and training platforms and use them as a way to break from work, but at the same time, as an avenue to develop soft skills.

Develop a Learning Mindset

Open-minded people, those with a learning mindset, are more likely to gather information than those resistant to change. Make sure to participate in all the company's activities or learning opportunities that arise. Look for training workshops, collaborative networks, and training sessions. Additionally, it seeks engagement from other employees through cross-functional initiatives.

Online training programs and digital resources should help you boost your soft skills if you're working remotely. Also, attend virtual community programs and discussion boards to see other people’s thoughts on the industry and experience.

Ask for Feedback

Sometimes, judging our own decisions or adequately evaluating them is difficult, so it is best to ask colleagues and friends about our soft skills, strengths, and weaknesses. You can start by pointing them out yourself so that when you seek advice from others, it solidifies what you already anticipated.

Asking for feedback means you’re willing to learn, which may show you some blind spots and areas for improvement. Alternatively, you can start with on online interpersonal skills self-assessment.

Take a Leadership Role

Learning through experience is the best way to understand or practice your soft skills. If you’ve taken the leadership path, you can try to look for opportunities that require a leader of some sort. Even if you’re at the lowest rank in an organization, leadership in any work gradually helps you learn these skills.

Sometimes, the opportunity does not arise at work, and you should take it. As long as you’re in a leadership role, you will understand how to coordinate people better in your community or at work.

Build Positive Relationships

Most soft skills you learn rely on your relationships with colleagues and managers. You can create this by doing more after-work activities asking about hobbies, family, and other non-work-related topics. More often than not, you will find a common stance and share experiences. You can recommend a group lunch and connect more if you work in large groups.

Having activities off-work is a fantastic way to communicate on a personal level. It can help you build your personal life and understand each other's personalities and how they weave into their professional morals.

Effective Communication

Effective communication is a skill that anyone in the workplace should learn and practice daily. Although your job may not necessarily involve talking to others, you can leverage that opportunity to build lasting relationships with people around you. The only way to develop this skill is through constant communication and improvement.

You’ll learn to address your senior employees, non-staff members, clients, and colleagues. You will understand the different approaches to communication and when to use specific language. Generally, you should speak clearly, adding non-verbal cues where possible. Seeing how others communicate is also an effective way of learning how to address people in your organization.

Adaptability

As you develop your soft skills, always be ready for change at work or in your department. Remember COVID? Yes, most people had to develop plenty of soft skills to keep their jobs. People had to learn how to operate Zoom, conduct online seminars, do virtual meetings, and publish reports without physically being in the office.

Another example is the new AI era we’re currently transitioning into. AI services can do some of the challenging admin work through third-party companies. If you learn how to leverage AI, you can be a great asset to your organization and even get benefits.

To survive and thrive at work, you have to be highly adaptable and easily handle rollercoaster sessions, adjusting to whatever changes may occur. At the advanced level, you can be flexible by learning newer soft skills that proactively shield you from such drastic changes.

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