There’s more than a little fuzziness around the concept of “soft skills.”\u00a0 “Hard skills” are thought of as those technical abilities which often lend their name to an entire profession:\u00a0 designing, architecture, repairing, nursing, and so on.\u00a0 These are easy to identify because there’s a specific body of knowledge around each, and they’re the kind of things that our schools teach.<\/p>\n
In contrast, soft skills are harder to define because they’re fuzzy, harder to describe, situation dependent, and often avoided by schools.\u00a0 So why bother?<\/p>\n
Because these are exactly the skills which are most portable during your career.\u00a0 I started out as a programmer, then got promoted to manager.\u00a0 Every time I moved to a new project I had to learn new technologies, but the core principles of how to work with my team members remained the same.\u00a0 Although my technical abilities as a programmer are now obsolete by decades, I continue to use core people-related skills that I learned way back when.\u00a0 Some from kindergarten.<\/p>\n
You’ll find lists of “soft skills” at various levels of detail.\u00a0 They’re often called “people skills” or “interpersonal skills.”\u00a0 Below that you’ll see things like negotiating, leading, managing, motivating, engaging, conversing, communicating, teaching, listening, and so on.\u00a0 All very valuable, and worth developing no matter what career you might have.<\/p>\n
I’ll offer an additional way to figure out some soft skills which might be important to you:\u00a0 Imagine that you’ve just had a conversation with a couple of people, which has now drawn to a close.\u00a0 You depart.\u00a0 One person says to the other, “That was useful; he (she) was quite ________.”<\/p>\n
What words would you prefer to see in that blank?\u00a0 competent?\u00a0 inspiring?\u00a0 articulate?\u00a0 motivating?\u00a0 friendly?\u00a0 smart?\u00a0 generous?\u00a0 spiritual?<\/p>\n
Pick two or three words that you would strive for, that you would most like to see used in the context of how you affect others.\u00a0 Sure, you might not feel that you live up to those words today – great.\u00a0 But if you can identify some ideals for how you will affect those around you<\/em>, you’ll have a lot more clarity on the soft skills you’d like to develop.\u00a0 That’s a lot more useful than having a general list of 20 attributes that try to describe the full breadth of human interaction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There’s more than a little fuzziness around the concept of “soft skills.”\u00a0 “Hard skills” are thought of as those technical abilities which often lend their name to an entire profession:\u00a0 […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[36,15,6,26],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-carl","4":"has-more-link","5":"post-578","7":"format-standard","8":"category-career","9":"post_tag-brand","10":"post_tag-career-coaching","11":"post_tag-coaching","12":"post_tag-leadership"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=578"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":580,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578\/revisions\/580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}