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The Top 60 Soft Skills at Work

Abstract:
Soft skills play a vital role for professional success;This article focuses on good soft skills which are in fact scarce in the highly competitive corporate world will help you stand out in a milieu of routine job seekers with mediocre skills and talent.

Courtesy: Rediff.com

Amit Kumar did his M Tech from IIT, New Delhi. He has an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad. But, he still could not get the job of his choice during campus recruitment.

Reason: Blame it on his soft skills; or, rather, the lack of them.

These include communication, listening, negotiation, etiquette, language skills etc. Hence, he could not compete with his fellow students who got better jobs.

Soft skills play a vital role for professional success; they help one to excel in the workplace and their importance cannot be denied in this age of information and knowledge.

The Smyth County Industry Council, a governing body based in the US, conducted a survey recently. The result of the survey was called the Workforce Profile, which found an across-the-board unanimous profile of skills and characteristics needed to make a good employee. The people most likely to be hired for available jobs have what employers call soft skills.

Here were some of the findings according to the workforce study:

The most common traits, mentioned by virtually every employer, were:

v       Positive work ethic 

v       Good attitude

v      Desire to learn and be trained

Mohan Rao, a technical director with Emmellen Biotech Pharmaceuticals Ltd, Mumbai defines a 'good attitude: It is a behavioural skill, which cannot be taught. However, it can be developed through continuous training. It represents the reactive nature of the individual and is about looking at things with the right perspective. You must be ready to solve problems proactively and create win-win situations. And you must be able to take ownership ie responsibility for your actions and lead from the front without calling it quits at the most critical moment.

Most of the business leaders observed that they could find workers who have hard skills ie the capability to operate machinery or fulfill other tasks, but many potential hires lack the soft skills that a company needs. 

CEOs and human resource managers said they are ready to hire workers who demonstrate a high level of soft skills and then train them for the specific jobs available. The ever-changing impact of technology has given hard-skills-only workers a short shelf life.

According to results of the Workforce Profile, (source: http://www.workforce.com) the more valuable employee is one who can grow and learn as the business changes.

Soft skills are as important, if not more important, than traditional hard skills to an employer looking to hire -- regardless of industry or job type. This could offer a major breakthrough as educators and training providers seek to develop and cluster training courses to fit business and industry needs.

Top 60 soft skills

The Workforce Profile defined about 60 soft skills, which employers seek. They are applicable to any field of work, according to the study, and are the personal traits and skills that employers state are the most important when selecting employees for jobs of any type.