Hot Topic: What are soft skills?

What Are Soft Skills? 12 Essential Soft Skills You Need in any work relationship

Soft skills are crucial to the modern work environment. Soft skills are the interpersonal attributes you need to succeed in a professional environment.

They are how you work with and relate to those around you.

If you’re applying for a role or project or looking to advance your career, you'll need to update your CV to highlight your soft skills.

These skills can include problem-solving, leadership, empathy, and communication.

In the modern world of work any applicant can expect to see the standard 'hard skills' in the requirements section of a role or project.

E.g., if you're looking for a graphic design project, you'll be expected to have fluency in Adobe CS. If you're looking to apply for a role as an in-house accountant, you can expect that you’ll need to be familiar with Quickbooks or master Excel. If a hiring manager is looking for a marketing specialist, there are clear hard skills that she will need to fulfil. Specific software knowledge, knowledge of paid advertising, a handle on market strategies, and brand strategy etc.

What you might not be expecting is the importance of soft skills in any professional relationship, whether it is a project based role, or you are working in a more permanent set up.

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In modern organisations a healthy company culture is increasingly important and hiring managers are taking soft skills directly into account when hiring for a role or a project. As freelancer it is especially important to consider your soft skills and showcase them when applying for a project. It helps built trust and confidence that you can easily adapt and fit into a team and more broadly in the company culture.

What Are Soft Skills?

Soft skills are also known as people skills, emotional skills, communication skills, and interpersonal skills. Typically, certain soft skills are inherent to a particular person, but soft skills can absolutely be learned.

While “hard skills" usually describe technical skills like the knowledge of CSS, a “soft skill” is something less quantifiable. However, soft skills are incredibly important, especially in flexible work environment that are becoming increasingly commonplace.

Which are the top soft skills that matter most in the Workplace

Soft skills are often the key to success in any professional environment, as they relate to working with others and engaging effectively with clients and team members.

Soft skills are typically adaptable to every workplace and every role or project, making them some of impactful transferable skills.

We have listed the 12 most important soft skills that will elevate your performance as a working professional.

1. Work Ethic

A healthy work ethic, not to be confused with overachieving, overworking, or losing sight of a healthy work life balance, is a soft skill of great value.

It encompasses important professional personality traits, like teamwork, reliability, and honesty.

A professional with a great work ethic keeps an eye on the parameters of their job or project. When there's a deadline, they can be trusted to meet it—or communicate when they can't (with an amended game plan or scope of work ready to be implemented).

There is no quick way to professional success. Your reputation as a professional is not built overnight. It requires hard work, focus, dedication, and a commitment to keeping healthy. Work ethic is an important soft skill.

2. Communication Skills

Communication soft skills are the tools you use to clearly and effectively interact with others, set expectations, and collaborate on projects.

Communication skills are more than speaking or emailing,it includes everything from collaboration to active listening.

Good communication skills are absolutely crucial to any successful professional relationship whether in a project based setting or if you are working in a more long term capacity as part of a team. Communication, includes nonverbal communication, body language, listening, and understanding.

3. Self-Motivation Skills

As more organisations transition into fully remote or flexible setups, self-motivation is an increasingly crucial set of skills to master.

Advice on building self-motivation is not one-size-fits-all. Knowing your greatest motivators requires knowing yourself.

4. Problem-Solving Skills

Even with perfect communication in place, problems always can arise in a professional context. As such, problem-solving dexterity is crucial in any professional relationship.

Problem-solving skills are a set of soft skills to use in difficult, unexpected, or complicated matters that arise in the workplace. Whether you're an entry-level freelancer or a C-level consultant, problem-solving skills will serve as an attractive asset to any employer.

Problem-solving skills include empathy-based skills like open-mindedness and communication-based skills like listening, creativity, research, and teamwork.

5. Flexibility

Flexibility is soft skill that is particularly useful when you are a freelancer or work remote.  

Flexibility in a professional setting allows you to use common sense to identify when something might not be working. It allows the ability to pivot and to welcome unexpected changes as positive, learning-based opportunities.

Flexible working professionals flawlessly embrace new tasks and challenges open-mindedly and without a big fuss.

Flexibility is patience in the face of problems—like a delayed deadline, an unexpected hiccup, or a colleague unexpectedly needing guidance or assistance.

6. Critical Thinking Skills

Critical thinking is using creativity and foresight to achieve tasks and reach goals in the most efficient ways.

Mastering critical thinking often requires a slowed-down pace, where you consider all parties involved and all possible outcomes before making a decision.

One of the best aspects of critical thinkers in the workplace is that they typically welcome change and improvement with open arms. Critical thinking is the key to keeping any workplace at the forefront of all that's happening—or about to happen.

Professionals with advanced critical thinking soft skills are like a workplace crystal ball.

7. Negotiation Skills

Negotiation is a discussion with the objective of reaching an agreement. This discussion involves strategy, persuasion, and give and take to resolve the issue at hand in a way that both parties find adequate.

The goal? All parties arrive at a compromise through a productive, educational conversation—ideally without conflict or tense argument.

Negotiation is a great soft skill because it requires nearly every other soft skill—like communication, understanding, empathy, creativity, and confidence.

You'll negotiate throughout your entire professional career. While the negotiations may vary in magnitude, you'll have plenty of time to practice and perfect your own negotiation tactics—while remaining true to yourself. If you are a freelancer, consultant or work in any flexible set up it is important to hone those negotiation skills, and cultivate strong relationship with your clients!

8. Creativity Skills

Creativity is relevant in most professions. Obvious ones, like graphic or interior design require creativity as a basic skill but in reality, every profession benefits from creativity.

Data Scientists are a great example of professionals that use creativity in conjunction with math and analytics.

Bringing creativity to your work is a lot like bringing critical thinking or open-mindedness to it. What can be achieved differently? How can I approach this from a different angle? What happens if I try this like this?

Think of creativity at work like looking at your job through a multi-surface prism. Being creative as a freelancer can really set you apart as a professional that can add real value and innovation to a project.

9. Empathy and Emotional Intelligence

Empathy, especially today, is of the utmost importance in the workplace.

In fact, without empathy, we're virtually unable to achieve any of the other soft skills we profiled so far. Creativity is basically nonexistent without empathy. Problem-solving is impossible without empathy as its guide. Diversity, inclusivity, and real belonging cannot exist without real empathy. Empathy is the ability to sense and understand other people's emotions—even when (and maybe especially so) it feels difficult to put yourself in someone else's shoes.  Empathy, especially in a professional environment, is a superpower.

Empathetic professionals can use open-mindedness and understanding to reach conflict resolution. They can receive and give meaningful without blame or defensiveness, respectively.

At the end of the day, empathy is the key to working alongside your clients, your team members, your network,—all humans who require a humanity-first approach.

10. Time Management

As we live in the age of measurable data, time management is increasingly a crucial skill. If you work in a freelance capacity or as a consultant or key strategist in a project time management is a non negotiable for many clients.

If you've ever worked alongside someone who flawlessly completes the same workload as you—only in half the time—you might be interested in developing this skill.

Like motivation, mastering time management skills requires knowing yourself, how you work, what your productivity levels are and what boundaries to establish. Once you have established a pattern

11. Organization

Great organisational skills make it easier to take care of business, whatever your professional set up, be it as a freelancer or on a project based role. It's having a work schedule in place that makes it nearly impossible to miss a beat.

Organization is an especially attractive skill in project management and data management roles.

Another huge benefit or organization? It allows any professional —to ensure that they are always meeting (and potentially exceeding) responsibilities.

Some organization items to work on can include:

•          Communication

•          Project management

•          Timeline management

•          Physical organization

•          Digital organization

12. Confidence

Confidence is an essential workplace soft skill. In fact, confidence is the key to believing that you can build and develop any (soft skill that is relevant in a professional setting.

Some confidence is inborn, but confidence can definitely be trained, there are proven techniques to help you build your confidence from the ground up

Confidence will always ebb and flow—it's simply a symptom of being human—but it can always be built, brick by brick.

If you're looking to build up your confidence starting right now, here are a few ideas:

•          Practice positive mantras—and repeat them often.

•          Identify and root out negative thinking and self talk

•          Learn new skills—and teach them to others.

•          Give your confidence a good crunch (you'll see what we mean).

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