When hiring, employers typically look for hard skills and soft skills.
Hard skills are job specific; soft skills are general. They’re personality traits and interpersonal skills that directly affect your relationships with other people, like communication, teamwork and empathy.
Many candidates struggle with soft skills because while you can learn from a training programme or earn professional certificates, these skills are honed through experience and dealing with people. It’s a consistent, iterative process that doesn’t come naturally to everyone.
It might sound fluffy to a hardened IT specialist, but soft skills are the key ingredient in advancing your career, even in the most high-tech environments.
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When Google analysed all the hiring, firing and promotion data it had accumulated since its foundation, it found soft skills are the defining characteristic of its top employees. Qualities like leadership, communication, empathy and critical thinking all ranked above technical skills.
Being a great developer or an IT specialist doesn’t make you a good manager or leader: soft skills do. And they’re a vital component of constant self-improvement – the key to a productive, long-term career.
The soft skills you need to work on (and why)
Teamwork
As you advance in your career, your technical skills will be the same as everybody else in your field. You’ll be surrounded by people like you, who are excellent at the hard skills.
“Teamwork incorporates numerous skill subsets.”
To get ahead in the workplace, you’ll need to be a team player. Teamwork incorporates numerous skill subsets: communicating effectively, asking questions for clarification, demonstrating concern, and using nonverbal cues like eye contact.
It’s also vital for showing off your hard skills. You may perform the bulk of your job duties alone, so you’ll need to think of your work in the context of the company’s larger goals, and communicate your accomplishments to other people at the organisation.
People skills
Building a rapport with people beyond your team is vital, too. In our recent interview with Darren Argyle (the first CISO of Qantas), he emphasised the power of community.
“It’s important to connect with peers, building a network of information-sharing,” Argyle said. “Typically in that group, you’ll find that somebody will start a conversation about something you haven’t heard before: your relationship allows you to ask the relevant questions.”
Argyle’s point is that these relationships can unveil new trends and knowledge, and give you an advantage in your current role and beyond. If that doesn’t convince you, then a powerful network is a crucial tool for finding new opportunities. A recent survey revealed that almost 85% of jobs were filled via networking.
The importance of people skills stretches beyond interviews. Once you’re hired, the projects you work on will include different disciplines and people. Stakeholder management, as it’s called, means agreeing and managing objectives among varied groups. Not just to make your work easier, but to engage the people who can help you deliver projects.
Leadership
If you’re going to advance in your career, pretty soon you’ll have people working for you, testing your ability to lead.
There’s a difference between leadership and management. Back in the early 1900s, theorist Frederick Taylor believed workers should be closely watched, and every aspect of their work be optimised, including how their desks are arranged.
“Autonomy doesn’t mean abandoning your people.”
Safe to say, Taylor’s ‘helicopter management’ style has died out, in favour of more modern techniques. Leadership is about inspiring teammates and giving them autonomy to do their best work. Autonomy doesn’t mean abandoning your people, but rather mentoring them to do their role without relying on your say-so.
Communication
Humans adore stories. Our brains excel at detecting patterns in information. Stories are patterns, and it’s easy to find meaning in them.
When you’re in an interview or communicating at work, storytelling methods can help you sell yourself. If you want to highlight your skills in an interview, for instance, focus on a specific example. Demonstrate your skills; don’t simply tell someone what you’re good at. Dry facts or statements can get you only so far
Ask yourself: What challenges did you face? How did you overcome them? Did you enjoy the experience? What did you learn from it?
It’s important to remember that communication isn’t speaking at, it’s about speaking with people. Communicating well doesn’t just mean speaking eloquently and clearly, either; it’s also about actively listening and responding to others, which requires attention and reflection.
How we’re perceived is a cornerstone of effective communication. And not only verbal, but written, too. In fact, written language is more difficult to master, since it’s indirect: you never know what state of mind your reader will be in.
Thankfully, we’ve all got multiple opportunities to train our writing skills every day via email. Rather than emailing the first thing that comes to mind, self-edit. Reflect on what it is you’re trying to say; be concise and direct, and think about your reader. This practice will make you a better writer over time and will improve your ability to communicate more widely.
Problem-solving
Problems frequently crop up at work: cyber security and IT professionals are particularly familiar with the myriad ways in which projects and systems can go wrong.
“Before you can resolve a problem, you must first determine that one exists.”
You’re equipped to fix problems, but here’s the trick: before you can resolve a problem, you must first determine that one exists. Awareness, communication, leadership and critical thinking are all engaged in effective problem-solving.
Finally, after recognising and assessing a problem, you’ll need to make (or advocate for) a choice. You’ll need to assess time or budget constraints, competing opinions, and your assessment of what might occur if the business does or doesn’t attempt to fix the issue.
In many ways, work is all about problem-solving, whether that means finance issues or staff satisfaction. Understanding the cause of these problems and developing plans to solve them is therefore an invaluable soft skill.
What can you do next?
Figuring out your soft skill profile is a good place to begin. Psychometric tests are now commonly used by employers to garner a full picture of a candidate, beyond their hard skills and qualifications.
Your recruiter may offer free psychometric testing as part of its candidate package, as identifi does. Improvement begins with knowing what your strengths and weaknesses are. Soft skills like networking come more naturally to some, but they can be improved through concerted effort.
These skills are hard to teach, so employers value people who already have them. Research by the American Psychological Association even found likeability to be a more powerful tool in job interviews than candidates who could promote their hard skills.
But soft skills aren’t only relevant at the job-hunting stage. Progression depends on the same skills you relied on at interview. Identify the soft skills you need, develop them and find ways to apply your experience to them.
These small wins in dealing with others will help you become not just a dream candidate, but a dream leader.
