Using your soft skills in the workplace: Definition, example and importance

No matter what recruiters look for in candidates they interview, you can pinpoint your success at the actual job to one thing. Your skills. Both soft and hard skills have their places in a professional’s life, and you use them in different settings. Technical or hard skills, are of course, useful for you to perform career-specific tasks. But using your soft skills in the workplace will help you to work well with your coworkers.

Now, this quote is a good few years old. And we aren’t here to discuss the Boeing Corporation. But what Stephens then said still holds value. Your interpersonal and behavioural skills at work can help to make or break your career.

This is why using your soft skills in the workplace to your best advantage is important. But first…

What are soft skills?

Unlike hard skills, which you can simply learn, soft skills cannot be taught in a classroom. These skills are personality traits that you already have.

Job-specific technical or hard skills are important to complete your responsibilities. However, recruiters also pay attention to candidates with good soft skills during the hiring process. These competencies, which include skills like interpersonal, communication, time management, are what makes someone a good team player.

Using your soft skills in the workplace is easy because they are transferrable. As a result, regardless of the job title, an employee can easily engage with others.

Types of soft skills

Soft skills are habits or traits that remain unique to each person. They can shape how you work by yourself and with others. There are different types of soft skills. Some of these skills are:

• Adaptability
• Empathy
• Dependability
• Ethics
• Creativity
• Problem solving
• Teamwork
• Time management
• Communication
• Receptiveness to learn
• Conflict resolution

How do you develop soft skills?

Soft skills, as we keep mentioning, are different from hard skills. They cannot be ‘taught’ in a traditional classroom. Nor can you take a test to evaluate your competency and grasp of these skills. However, they CAN be improved and refined. For instance, take ‘communication skills. In its barest form, it’s about listening and talking to people.

But actually using this soft skill in the workplace involves more than just listening and talking. Communication skills also involve other skills like negotiation, presentation, public speaking, writing reports, storytelling, visual communication. These are skills you can enhance through practice and in some cases, even study to improve.

Another way to improve or develop your soft skills is to use them every day. For instance, every day you interact with your colleagues and work with them on projects. These are opportunities to improve skills like team working, problem-solving, and conflict resolution. Further, interacting with others gives you an opportunity to improve your empathy.

Why is using your soft skills in the workplace important?

In order to succeed in a professional setting, you need both soft and hard skills. It’s easy to see why you need hard or technical skills that are specific to your job. But soft skills are more tricky. They are not just beneficial to make you a personable team player. There are other benefits that come with using your soft skills in the workplace. For instance:

• The use of AI and automation. Technology is making lives easier. On the flip side, its also making many jobs redundant. As human-driven processes get replaced with technology, careers that focus more on hard skills will become scarcer. Your interpersonal skills and other soft skills may decide whether you have a job or not.
• Soft skills are relevant regardless of trends. A software engineer friend of mine said something about the field that stuck with me. That people “get old, not experienced” at it. Why? Well, because as new programmes keep coming out, their knowledge about previous software systems become redundant. Thus, those technical or hard skills get irrelevant. As a result, they have to constantly relearn new skills. This is not the case with soft skills. They remain necessary.