Importance of Soft Skills: Why Employers Love Them So MuchHow great is the importance of soft skills or “people skills?” Both hard and soft skills are very important. But beyond the most obvious things like correcting typos in your resume and dressing appropriately for your interview, there's one thing that I recommend my clients develop, describe and demonstrate throughout the entire job search process ... ... One thing that employers look for beyond the basic technical or "hard" skills required to do one’s day-to-day work ... You guessed it :-) - that one thing is soft skills. Importance of Soft Skills: What are Soft Skills? Soft skills include all of the skills we use to effectively deal with people. Generally, demonstrations of soft skills feature the common link of communicating with others - with a strong focus on live in-person contacts, but also including written communication skills. This often means how we get along with others, ranging from basic communication to how to constructively address and resolve conflicts when they arise. Of course, if you’re a social worker, clinical therapist, customer service clerk, personal support worker or early childhood educator then you’re obviously someone who needs to develop a lot of soft skills and demonstrate them throughout your professional training and on a moment-to-moment basis in your day-to-day work. But I’m talking about everybody here. Absolutely everyone needs to understand offer soft skills to employers throughout their job search and when they’re on the job. So I’m also referring to people who are not generally thought to work in "soft skills" jobs. Like people who work in information technology, accounting and the skilled trades. Rightly or wrongly, these people are sometimes stereotyped as lacking people skills for one reason or another. Importance of Soft Skills: Why are Soft Skills Important? Whether or not those stereotypes are accurate, the fact remains that the more people skills or soft skills we develop and demonstrate, the more likely we are to find and keep work in our field and the better we can both help teammates and serve customers and clients. And these days we all serve customers and clients, with few exceptions. More people with well-developed soft skills on a team means that team will function better. It will be more efficient and operate with more clarity and goodwill, and less misunderstandings and conflict. Staff are happier and more productive, as well as more likely to stay with the employer for the long term. Employees with stronger soft skills will more easily and naturally please customers and clients. These stronger communication skills help the employer to keep these patrons’ business. Patrons feel listened to and respected and are more likely to come back for more business rather than going somewhere else. And they’ll tell their friends about their good fortune too, resulting in growth and greater stability for the company. Importance of Soft Skills: Hard Skills and Soft Skills In contrast to soft or interpersonal skills, hard or technical skills are the core skills that allow you to complete your official responsibilities, such as the ability to summarize accounting documents using computer software programs, or put up drywall using nails and plaster. Most people know how to fulfill the core technical duties of their trade without much trouble. Some people are more talented than others, but by-and-large it’s not hard to find someone who’s good at crunching numbers, editing magazine articles or stocking shelves. What’s less common and much more in demand are the soft skills that every employer hopes comes with that technically well-qualified candidate. That's why it's important for you to fully describe your soft skills in your resume, and then continue this strategy into the interview to clearly set yourself apart from other candidates. Importance of Soft Skills: How to Effectively Emphasize Soft Skills in Your Resume If you’re not sure what to do next to improve your resume then I strongly suggest that you focus on adding more soft skills to it or improving the parts of your resume that describe them. And I also encourage you to mention soft skills throughout your resume, not just in your summary or experience sections. Soft skills are what give the resume its “heart.” So regardless of your profession, your resume needs soft skills in specific and concrete detail. Unfortunately, job applicants rarely speak in enough depth about soft skills on their resumes, often opting for a note near the top in the summary section that says something like “Excellent communication skills.” But "excellent communication skills" is really vague, isn’t it? For both you when you're preparing your resume, and the employer to whom you’re trying to reach out and impress. Everyone puts “excellent communication skills” on their resume! And that’s great if it’s true, but in addition we need to tell employers more particular, concise, concrete information about our soft skills if we want them to really understand all that we have to offer them. Coming up on the next page is my soft skills inventory - some examples of specific soft skills that you could use to develop your own unique list in your resume and elsewhere in your job search. Here’s how I suggest that you use this list as one of your job search tools: • Use both general and specific terms in your interview, cover letter and within the objective/headline, summary of qualifications and experience sections of your resume, wherever you think it would fit in best. • Try dividing your resume summary of qualifications section into "Technical Skills" and "Soft Skills" (or alternately, "Interpersonal Skills" or "People Skills") to properly emphasize your people skills, acknowledge how important they are to employers, and show that you offer a strong, balanced skill set regardless of your profession. • “Be yourself”: Convert this “starter material” into your own unique word combinations and phrases for best results. • Then go even a little but further by actively demonstrating these skills to employers whenever the opportunity arises. I hope this information on the importance of soft skills helps you to bolster this crucial aspect of your job search. It's important for you to know about, write about, talk about and demonstrate these skills in your resume, cover letter, interview, thank you letter and networking activities. The more that you emphasize the importance of these soft skills in combination with the hard or technical skills required in your job, the more success you'll enjoy throughout your career.
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