In this rapidly evolving professional landscape where technical proficiency is essential but no longer sufficient, the concept of soft skills has taken center stage. These skills are the bedrock of effective communication, collaboration, and adaptability, pivotal in personal and professional success.
For the purposes of work process organization and staff education, we can divide all work activities into two categories:
- those requiring some professional competency, often technological or creative, such as driving, operating a 3D printer, programming, and 3D modelling,
- those requiring an understanding of others and usually directed toward other people, such as communication, creativity, problem-solving, and time management.
The former are hard skills and may be associated with logic and technologies, while the latter are soft skills, and one may connect them with ethics and humanities. Both of them are equally important, although for different purposes. There are skills that are the intervention between hard and soft ones: prominent examples are writing and project management.
Here we’ll overview the soft skills, see their examples, and explore how they’re taught in companies in the best way. CleverLMS is an example of a learning management system that is good for them. Soft skills training requires practice and interactivity, as all of them are directed towards interactions with other people and processes in which people are engaged.
Table of Contents
Definitions
Hard skills are usually necessary to do some specific work. Write a code, drive a vehicle, make a surgery, there are hundreds of processes and hundreds of hard skills to master. Usually, they’re associated with the main competence of a person, although many people are specializing in soft skills.
To define soft skills, let’s start with their purpose: influence others while maintaining good working conditions and well-being in general. Therefore, they’re connected with psychology and aim at working with people. Some professions require them more than others, such as nurses or salespeople.
There are two primary roads of implementation of them: interactions inside the company, and outside it. The first includes communications between team members and efficient organization of their workflow, while the second is about negotiations with partners and work with customers. Soft skills examples include efficient communication, persuasion, workflow organization, and emotional intelligence. We’ll overview them later.
Therefore, the company benefits greatly if its employees are proficient in soft skills. It facilitates communication and teamwork and ensures that all work processes run smoothly. Hard skills drive the company shortly, while soft skills maintain the conditions for hard skills to work well.
Read Also: Meaning of Soft Skills in The Software Developing Process
So, How To Improve Soft Skills?
Improvement and examples
Regular soft skills training for employees is a good way to ensure that your company will become more competitive. There are positions that utterly depend on them: the most common and prominent examples are sales managers, project managers, and customer support managers, whose responsibilities are based on communication, listening, understanding, and persuading.
There are many of them, and probably you’ll find much more if you need them, but let’s present a list of soft skills to understand our subject better.
- Communication is the ability to formulate messages clearly to transmit information without losses and with understanding from another person.
- Negotiation is the process of opinion exchange to reach some mutual agreement that benefits both parties. Good negotiators are able to persuade the other party to agree on good terms without doing any direct or indirect harm to it.
- Emotional intelligence includes understanding others’ feelings and the ability to control and guide one’s own feelings, and it’s crucial for meaningful communication.
- Problem-solving skills aim to identify various flaws in workflows, communications, manufacturing, and other processes and propose actions to solve them efficiently.
- Sales include the ability to describe in detail the pros and cons of some item and persuade someone to buy it, either in a personal communication or via marketing.
- Creativity is the ability to unite concepts and ideas in new ways, obtaining new concepts which may then be used to improve the workflow, inspire others, or earn money.
- Time management is the organization of time schedules, tasks, events, and deadlines and following them to achieve desired objectives.
- Critical thinking includes the ability to analyze information in the form of evidence and search for consequences from it, identifying and avoiding cognitive biases.
- Leadership is rather a specific set of skills, including the ability to persuade, unite people, organize, inspire, and lead to a single goal, but they’re often united together.
Learning management systems
These are educational tools designed to help companies uplift their workers’ skills. Based on the CleverLMS features, let’s summarize what you’d like to expect from a good LMS and how to implement it in your staff’s soft skills training. Before that, see its interface on the screenshot below.
- Courses to teach the basics of the chosen skills.
- Messaging enables live discussions to ask for advice and train skills.
- Media and documents to exchange learning materials.
- Ratings and gift scores to enhance and maintain motivation.
- Tasks and event planners to organize the learning process and connect it with the workflow.
For example, to learn time management, it’s important to understand which objectives must be done and which people are engaged in them, building good communication with them and ensuring that everyone understands their responsibility.
In CleverLMS, one can do this by creating an online course dedicated to time management and assigning tasks, which consolidate the knowledge once completed. Live discussions in the app enables actual skills practicing with team members, consolidating them further, while ratings and the gift store maintain learners’ motivation.
Let’s wrap the article up by exploring which soft skills your company may need most and why they’re so important.
Which of them do you need?
Now, as you see how soft skills work and how to train them, let’s evaluate top soft skills for your organization. We’ll ask several questions and suppose which of them are the best for those situations.
- Do you rely on interpersonal communication in your workflows? Then, focus on communications and creativity to enhance teamwork and ensure good results.
- Do you rely on sales? Then, leadership, sales, negotiations, and emotional intelligence are what you need to train your staff’s sustainability and persuasion skills.
- Do you rely on specific technological solutions? Examples are hi-tech startups. Critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills are crucial here to solve knowledge-intensive problems and create working inventions.
- Is your work environment stressful? Examples are hospitals and manufactures. Focus on emotional intelligence, time management, and problem-solving to ensure the most efficient workflows and stress reduction.
Conclusion
The importance of soft skills follows from the fact that they’re all about people: working with them, cooperating, connecting various people, and creating the best conditions for work and business. According to LinkedIn Talent Trends, soft skills are as valuable as hard ones or even more for recruiters, and there’s a purpose for that.
They enable you to reach various purposes: negotiate on good terms, organize workflows, promote your products and services, and maintain clear and meaningful communication in your team. As the modern world is deeply interconnected, the ability to work with people will increase your competitiveness greatly. CleverLMS provides all the necessary features for the interactive training of soft skills in your organization, so be sure to check it.
