Soft Skills- Why Soft Skills Are Important For Everyone

Well whether you are a student, professional or even a parent soft skills are significant for everyone. We are encircled by people at every stage of life. Whether it is our family members, friends, colleagues, seniors, or others we met. The art of knowing how to get along with people and displaying a positive attitude is crucial sometimes.

Here soft skills play an essential role in our life at every phase of life. 

What are Soft Skills?

Soft skills or interpersonal skills are important aspects of one’s personality. Soft skills are often called as people skills or life skills. They are personal attributes that can affect relationships, communication, and interaction with others.

Soft skills are a collection of personal qualities, attitudes, habits, and social behavior that illustrates an overall personality of a person. These skills can include social graces, communication abilities, language skills, personal habits, cognitive or emotional empathy, time management, teamwork, and leadership traits.

Soft Skills vs. Hard Skills

Hard skills are a set of skills or expertise that shows you have knowledge about a particular subject and you have expertise on it. Subjects you will learn in school or college come under hard skills. Hard skills are technical skills you have for any particular subject or field.

When you pop out for a job to start your professional career, companies look for a combination of hard skills and soft skills in the potential employee before hiring.

If employers looking for both skills in a candidate, then why these skills are not part of our curriculum till now?

Do our schools and colleges doesn't know the importance of these skills or they are ignoring the importance of soft skills for a student?

When we should start learning Soft Skills?

If we talk about hard skills, subjective knowledge or technical skills; our school and college studies are focused on these skills very well. But why they forget about soft skills.

The trend has changed in the last years. Hard skills still represent a fundamental aspect, but soft skills equated them for importance. According to the leadership professor Robert Lavasseur, most of the researchers he interviewed in this field  “rated soft skills higher than technical skills”. Because of their rising importance, the need to teach soft skills has become a major concern for educators and employers all over the world.

“The development of soft skills is much more difficult than the development of hard skills because it requires actively interacting with others on an ongoing basis and being willing to accept behavioral feedback”.

The OECD ‘Future of Education and Skills 2030’ report released in 2019 highlighted the growing importance of soft skills in education due to trends such as globalization and rapid advancements in technology and artificial intelligence, which demand changes in the labor market and the skill set which future workers require to succeed.

Another key finding from the literature is that to maximize the benefits of soft skills over the long term, they should be focused on young children particularly from the age of 1 – 9 years old.

If our schools start teaching soft skills from 9 years onwards from now, then we can empower our future generation and equip them with the right combination of skills they require for future jobs. Because like any other skill, students need ample time to practice these skills.

Why we undervalue soft skills?

It is considered by default that technical skills or hard skills are of great significance in executing or performing any job. But, do you think just knowing ‘how to do the task?’  can help you perform the task effectively?

Well, If you ask me, I don’t think so. According to me, what plays a major role in performing a task effectively are the ‘soft skills’.

I believe that being part of the society, the reason why people undervalue interpersonal skills is that they believe these skills are generally fixed — how often have you heard someone be described as a ‘natural born leader’. They think either you are born with these skills or you will simply live without them. And this mindset makes people put less effort into these skills. 

But the scenario is completely changed now, as more and more job activities become automated, soft skills, which cannot yet be replicated by machines, have become more important.

Deloitte also reported that "soft skill-intensive occupations will account for two-thirds of all jobs by 2030" and that hiring employees with more soft skills could increase revenue by more than $90,000.

So, it is high time to polish your soft skills before this growing competition will leave you behind.

 

 

 

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