Table of Contents
Introduction:
You may be known at your workplace for being the best at what you do; you probably would have scored the highest marks in your examinations but it means very less if you don’t have the skills that you need, by skills we mean soft skills, do you have the skill of ‘teamwork’ or say ‘good listening’, or probably ‘leadership’? These are some of the most important professional skills that can’t be taught in the classroom, soft skills are more crucial to get you recruited than you think.
What are soft skills?
The highly popular search result on google for “define soft skill” is “personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people.” Well, unlike hard skills, these skills cannot be measured but can be demonstrated. One reason that soft skills are so important is that they are the key to build relationships, gaining a reputation, and creating more opportunities for you to develop your relationships.
Must-Have Soft Skills:
Let us have a look at what are some crucial soft skills to get hired or to accelerate your career goals.
Communication:
The first and the most crucial soft skill to take your career to the next level is communication. Let’s find out why good communication is important. Both written and verbal communication skills are very important in the workplace. The benefits of good communication are that they help you create a positive image, they improve your chances of building relationships with your co-workers, and communication skills boost your performance, so whether it’s at your workplace or in your college, you are going to boost your performance if your communication is strong.
Why do employers look for a candidate with good communication skill? A very clear answer workers are more productive when they know how to communicate with each other. If you can clearly express the “who, what, when, why, where, and how” of a project, you’ll be a top productive employee, which means you’ll be much in demand. So, employees must develop verbal and written communication.
Here are some tips to gain this crucial soft skill, the first thing that you can do is you can probably join a public speaking workshop where you get an opportunity to speak publicly and gain your confidence and second may be reading as much as possible which will increase the vocab and also the important thing to keep in mind is the proper pronunciation.
The second thing of importance is, apart from speaking you also need to be an active listener. So active listening is when you wait until the other person has finished speaking and listen to what they are saying before you start speaking. This is a very important and often overlooked skill of communication. Listen carefully and try public speaking workshops.
But that’s not it, lastly, you can also learn to monitor your body language, which means to develop your ability to communicate non-verbally. So this can mean maintaining good eye contact while talking, nodding while you’re listening, and a firm handshake when you’re leaving. So these are just some examples of body language.
Teamwork:
One important skill to other crucial soft skills for your career advancement is, “teamwork”. Why is teamwork important? To answer this, you need it because no one person doing everything by himself or herself can make a project successful. So success is the result of many people working together to achieve a common goal. Therefore when employers want to hire employees, they look for the skill of teamwork.
The basic reason for this is because a good teamwork spirit improves the culture of the office and it improves the office environment, due to which many people stay in the organization and top talent comes to them. Now that we know that teamwork is a very important skill to take your career to the next level, but what are the ways to gain the skill? The first thing that you could do is, lend a hand, which means to help someone when you see a friend or classmate or a co-worker in need. Another way to build the skill would be is by offering a cover for a colleague which means that if someone’s on a vacation and you need to cover for them before they ask you it’s better that you walk to them and offer your service.
So this way you can display your spirit of teamwork and the third way of being a team player is to take responsibility for your actions. So that means whenever you’ve made a mistake, rather than blaming someone else you should accept it, this is a very important point to be a good team worker.
Adaptability:
The next crucial soft skill to escalate your career is, “adaptability”. Adaptability means the ability to adapt, which I think simply means to be flexible. The question is, why do you need to be flexible? Well, it’s because things don’t always go as planned. So the better thing is instead of complaining about how things are not turning up as you wanted them to turn up, the best thing is to find alternate solutions and this is what good leaders do, they find solutions to problems and not increase the problem.
The importance of this skill when you see from the employer perspective, it’s because the speed of change in any organization is so fast that employees need to adapt to the changes in the organization. The best way to gain this skill is to push yourself, that’s how you can be flexible and you can adapt to the changes. To be an early adopter of change, for example, adapting to technology without moaning is crucial, due to this people can see you as someone who’s capable of meeting new challenges or if you’re in your college another way would be to attend training sessions to learn new things about your area of study so you can display that you are quick to learn and you love to be flexible and adapt new changes.
Problem Solving:
Now another critical soft skill for your career growth is, “problem-solving”. The reason you need this skill is that when something goes wrong, you can either complain about it or take action and of course it’s taking action that will get you noticed. Knowing how to think on your feet, which means, to think of quick solutions, or to make decisions very quickly. This is a very important skill when it comes to being an important part of an organization.
Why do employers look for it? The reason is very simple because companies face many problems every day and they need solvers and these solvers namely the top performers, their performance helps them to sail through unexpected challenges. The best way to gain this skill is to always approach your boss with a solution, not a problem. When an issue arises, sit down and think through how you’re going to solve before bringing it to your boss’s attention and he will appreciate your effort to solve the problem even before bringing it.
Critical Thinking:
The last but not of the least important of the five soft skills to take your career to the next level is, “critical thinking”, so why do we need this skill? To answer this critical thinking is essential to bring new ideas in the workplace. Critical thinking means thinking about the positives and the negatives of every idea and employees need to be able to think about this to be better problem solvers as we discussed in the previous step and this skill will make you successful no matter what your job is.
How to develop your critical thinking skills? We think the only way to develop it is by learning, so find ways to learn. You can read the news every day, you can discuss the non-work issue with your friends and family members, the reason you can do this is to generate ideas because when you discuss problems with others, you’re able to brainstorm new ideas and this will help your critical thinking processes. Reading books are an important aspect to accelerate learning, they are the best source of knowledge. We know you might complain that reading books requires time. We have got you covered, Click here to try our top 2 minutes business book summaries. That will help.
This brings us to the end of this article and today we took an overview of the top skills that can take your career to the next level. Do always remember that development is not a one-day process, it’s a continuous process. Results may take time but will be seen eventually.
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