And how you can share your geekiness (hard skills) with others by leveraging your soft skills!
By Amin Sazuki
There is an ongoing debate regarding the two entirely different skill sets and their relevance with respect to the workforce and hiring process.
Generally, we refer to hard skills as learned abilities acquired through practice, repetition, and education. Software engineering, cybersecurity, data analysis, sales, digital marketing are some of the most sought after hard skills of our time. The levels of competency can be defined, and there is a direct path for achieving them.
Meanwhile, soft skills fall into the interpersonal realm; they are intangibles and harder to quantify objectively. Think of soft skills as healthy personal habits and traits that shape the way you work — both individually or in a team.
They are not so much taught rather cultivated and all of us are predisposed to be stronger in certain soft skill areas due to our upbringing and past experiences. However, similar to hard skills, these traits can be cultivated over time, albeit in a different way.
Collaboration, communications, creativity, and problem-solving are some of the most valuable soft skills in today’s workforce.
The Rising Importance of Soft Skills
Things have changed over the last decade, and slowly the answer to this debate is drifting cautiously towards soft skills.
Back in 2016 when IR4.0 was still in its infancy stage, a report called Hard Facts About Soft Skills, 93% of recruiters think soft skills are vital and indispensable when it comes to hiring new talents.
Similarly, according to LinkedIn Global Talent Trend Reports, 92% of Talent Acquisition Professionals thought soft skills were at least equally important to hard skills during the hiring process. 89% of these same professionals admitted that it’s typically a soft skills issue when a new hire doesn’t work out.
A report from SHRM called A Talent Landscape in June 2016 concluded that 84% of HR respondents saw a critical shortage in soft skills. This became a deeper problem when COVID-19 struck.
Many businesses have shifted their strategy to incorporate some degree of automation and digitisation to minimise human interactions as a response to COVID. As a result, the demand for labour-intensive skills is declining at a pace we have never seen before.
Not only that, the virus has enlightened the white-collars about the benefits of remote work and its practicability — but only if the professionals in question are equipped with indispensable soft skills such as integrity, strong work ethic and communication skills.
Now, this does not imply hard skills are rendered obsolete or useless, rather they serve as a baseline for you to build a solid career over them.
Hard Skills as a Baseline, Soft Skills to Make Them Shine
We are often taught to practise balance in everything that we do, and having the right amount of hard skills and soft skills is commonly added to the list of things we are advised to seek balance in.
Having journeyed with a myriad of talents over the last 30 years of our organisation’s existence, we have come to realise that while hard skills and soft skills are of equal importance to enable us to be high performing individuals, seeking a balance between having the right amount of hard skills and soft skills is not the key to unlock our greatest potential.
Rather, we believe that each of us needs to be fundamentally strong in our hard skills — defined by our level of knowledge in our focus area. This forms the baseline to serve our core job function.
But it shouldn’t end here because it takes soft skills such as analytical thinking to help us understand problems methodologically, creative thinking to lead us to discover innovative solutions, effective communications to be a value-adding team player, and good time management to enable us to cope with deadlines — just to name a few.
For example, technology experts require effective communication in order to explain technical processes in a concise and easy-to-understand manner to their customers.
The same goes for recruiting. When it comes to hiring managerial positions as a software development company, we value key leadership skills such as delegation and facilitation as much as code literacy, core developer skills, and years worth of experience. This is because we know that a team led by a manager with inadequate soft skills will tank and fall flat.
While you may still get the job done with an impressive stack of hard skills, your soft skills are the ones that will help you keep the job, enable your teammates to work better together, and propel you through the ranks.
In essence, you need hard skills as a baseline and a stack of soft skills on top of it.
Closing Thoughts
There is no denying that hard skills are absolutely necessary to land a job or to climb the corporate ladder. But nowadays, having only hard skills to show for will not cut it anymore, as the modern workplace is becoming interpersonal.
Also, without the right soft skills to bring out your hard skills, others wouldn’t know the extent of your potential and how knowledgeable you are.
Therefore, never neglect the importance of your softer skills — to bring your harder skills to light as well as to adapt to the current dynamic in the workplace.