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Successful attitude towards work with these 7 Soft-Skills

“It is not the strongest or most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.” – Charles Darwin

Soft skills represent the habits that can improve how you work with others and how they work with you. This article published on Forbes, sheds light on 7 important skills that will help you create a positive partnership with your colleagues.

  1. Adaptability: One must be ready to apply flexibility when dealing with critical situations.
  2. Teachability: Embrace criticism and be ready to proactively acting upon it, we always have something new to learn.
  3. Punctuality: Simple but crucial.
  4. Communication: This soft skill is a two-way street, it goes both ways. Make your messages clear and actively listen to what     others might say
  5. Service Mindset: Try and care for the people around you both coworkers and customers
  6. Proactivity: Use creative thinking to develop to prevent a reactive approach to work. Don’t always passively wait for new tasks.
  7. Ownership: Embrace responsibility.

 

Image source: Pixabay

 

Soft skills to succeed in the workplace

How many soft skills you can think of? The Blog Aboutcareers has made a comprehensive list which shows how vast and articulated this domain is.

In this context, Soft skills are defined as the personal attributes you need to succeed in the workplace. Regardless of the job, you need at least some soft skills to be successful.

Here is a list of 10 chosen at random just to give and idea:

  1. Able to Listen
  2. Delegation
  3. Facilitating
  4. Good at Storytelling
  5. Motivating
  6. Problem-solver
  7. Respectful
  8. Sense of Humor
  9. Time Management
  10. Writing Skills

Check the full list

Image source: Flickr – Elle * (CC BY 2.0)

The hard truth about soft skills

54 lessons organized in 8 chapters, each of them covering an aspect where soft skills play an important role: career management, getting the job done, communication, handling critics, office politics, self-promotion, dealing with differences and leadership.

In her book “The hard truth about soft skills – workplace lessons smart people wish they’d learned sooner“, Peggy Klaus, tells us about the importance of soft skills on workplace, trying to understand why they are still so often ignored, although they are fundemental in our everyday work. The problem is semantic? What is soft cannot be considered serious? The matter is that most of us think that they are about touchy-feely people skills?

Among the 54 lessons pinted out by Klaus on the basis of her work experience:

hardtruthcover1. Knowing yourself is as important as knowing how to do your job
2. Learn when to stick and when to shift or the details will hang you
3. Know where to draw the line between self-improvement and self-destruction
4. When it comes to gossip, learn the art of deflection
5. Don’t take it personally
6. Your procrastination is trying to tell you something
7. Keep your visibility when you are not face-to-face

 

Soft skills to succeed in the workplace

How many soft skills you can think of? The Blog Aboutcareers has made a comprehensive list which shows how vast and articulated this domain is.

In this context, Soft skills are defined as the personal attributes you need to succeed in the workplace. Regardless of the job, you need at least some soft skills to be successful.

Here is a list of 10 chosen at random just to give and idea:

  1. Able to Listen
  2. Delegation
  3. Facilitating
  4. Good at Storytelling
  5. Motivating
  6. Problem-solver
  7. Respectful
  8. Sense of Humor
  9. Time Management
  10. Writing Skills

Check the full list  4605043024_c2a7051918_bImage source: Flickr – Elle * (CC BY 2.0)

Soft skills: the new asset for “digital” workers

In the current labour market, deeply modified by social integration and economic and cultural globalization, the development of soft skills — skills that are more social than technical— is a crucial part of fostering a dynamic workforce. These skills can be gained from past jobs, responsibilities, life experiences and personal interests. They can be even hidden and, when identified, they can help people become better contenders in job search as well as in the daily-working activities.

International researches have made a list of skills a person should have to compete successfully in the global economy of the 21st century:

  • Creativity/innovation
  • Critical thinking
  • Information literacy
  • Problem solving
  • Decision making
  • Flexibility and adaptability
  • Learning to learn
  • Research and inquiry
  • Communication
  • Initiative and self direction
  • Productivity
  • Leadership and responsibility
  • Collaboration
  • ICT operations and concepts
  • Digital Citizenship

For the full study by David Finegold and Alexis Spencer Notarbartolo on the impact of 21st century competencies click here

Skills_27

Image source: Flickr by Yoel Ben-Avraham – CC BY-ND 2.0 

Post by: Omar Appolloni

Making sure your hard skills shine

Soft skills are becoming crucial for career success as the world gets increasingly competitive. Beyond technical skills, the softer, interpersonal and relationship-building skills are the ones that help people excel at work.

The problem is such skills are often taken for granted and there is far less training provided for them than for traditional hard skills. That’s why it is so important to focus on soft skills training and development.

Check out if you have a soft skills gap on: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCDV_34.htm

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Image source: http://bit.ly/1gvpfUT