Soft skills

You may be more familiar with hard skills, which are often based on specific knowledge like how to do a certain task or use a specific piece of technology, but “soft skills focus more on your actual behaviors or habits in work situations,” says Muse career coach Al Dea.

What Are Soft Skills?

From empathy to curiosity, here’s how to learn and practice nontechnical abilities.

Written by Brian Nordli
Image: Shutterstock
UPDATED BY
Matthew Urwin | May 23, 2023
REVIEWED BY

Soft skills refer to the interpersonal and critical-thinking abilities people rely on at work. It’s the ability to communicate coherent ideas, compromise with colleagues and brainstorm creative solutions to difficult problems.

Soft skills stand in contrast to hard skills, which involve the technical know-how you need to do your job. These include being able to code in Javascript, work in Excel, create an advertising campaign and so on.

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How can you improve your soft skills?

Because they’re not based on specific knowledge like hard skills, soft skills are often considered more difficult to learn or strengthen. And there’s a bit of truth to that, but that doesn’t mean you can’t develop your soft skills. Follow these steps:

• Establish where your soft skills stand now. Our experts suggest looking at past feedback from performance reviews and other sources and/or asking for current feedback; looking at your past and current work responsibilities and identifying which soft skills have helped you succeed in your job and which ones could have helped; or taking a skills assessment or quiz (like this, this, and this).
• Identify one or two areas you want to focus on first. Think about any areas where you’re often running into problems at work or repeatedly getting feedback on. These are probably the soft skills you want to start with. For example, do you always find yourself needing to re-explain what you wrote in an email? Maybe look into improving your writing skills.
• Practice. Smith recommends putting yourself in situations where you’ll have to stretch your soft skills, but start small. For example, do you struggle with public speaking? Maybe you can give a short presentation to your immediate team at an upcoming meeting. Are your leadership skills lacking? Volunteer to run point on a simple project. And whenever possible during your practice, ask for feedback.
• Consider taking a class. While online classes for soft skills are less common than classes on how to use a flashy new program, you can still find courses online that will help you with your interpersonal and other skills.
• Ask your network for help. “Find a mentor who is good at what you’re trying to improve and ask them to coach you,” Smith suggests. Or if you have a coworker who’s great at the soft skill you’re trying to work on, you might observe and evaluate what they do and think about how you can apply these strategies yourself, Dea says.

Источники:

https://builtin.com/articles/what-are-soft-skills&rut=85cf5ca413c69011010524976377fe6909d0a67034c479726f65ee687e25bc16
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_skills&rut=9a31be8f723f23670e330bc8f1e831db2a5ff1fd0277da4203972752f0c86779
https://www.themuse.com/advice/soft-skills-definition-examples&rut=7eb2edd791218bede4bfb9f5626c602e69dd962a73fcab110c32b928d006ca05