Soft skills are attributes of personality that determine how well can you work in an organization. These are the skills that help in building relationship with coworkers, build trust among the team, and ultimately be successful. Hard skills, or technical skills, are must for a candidate working in an IT sector, but soft skills make them successful.
According to a study by LinkedIn, top five soft skills are creativity, collaboration, persuasion, adaptability, and emotional intelligence. Let us look at each of these skills objectively to understand how they play a vital role.
- Creativity: For an IT employee, creativity is necessary in every aspect of work. Whether it is to design a new code or solve a problem, creativity is the origin of ideas that they implement in work. As per Psychology Today, 94% of hiring managers say it is important to consider creativity when hiring a job candidate.
- Collaboration: Every interaction requires soft skill. An organization is basically a team, which works best when they collaborate effectively. In IT sector, service is the product. Hence, IT employees basically have to work with clients and their address issues, making collaborative traits a vital skill to have.
- Persuasion: When a client is complaining about some error that needs to be resolved quickly, a tech person first needs to assure the client and persuade them to allow you to fix the problem. It is then you can actually begin the work. Therefore, it may be your tech skills that fix the issue, but your soft skills come first in addressing the issue.
- Adaptability: Being in IT sector, adaptability is a trait that every employee should possess. This trait basically means being open to change and adjust with the changing environments. This also ensures resilience in employees as they become less averse strategic changes, changing responsibilities, trends, and other important aspects of work.
- Emotional Intelligence: Stress or crisis management is a skill that is given a great importance and emotional intelligence plays a crucial part here. Compartmentalizing emotions to function effectively is what portrays your emotional intelligence. According to LinkedIn Emotional intelligence is responsible for 58% of success.
The environment at workplaces has undergone a significant change over the last decade. With evolution of technology, the culture of the company, their brand values, the look, and feel of the workplaces have changed. There is an emergence of a culture, popularly called as Tech culture that defines how IT industries function. The soft skills that formulate this culture can be classified into three broad categories:
- Communication skills: These include writing skills, presentation skills, collaboration, persuasion, managing conflicts, listening, and speaking.
- Management skills: Conceptualizing, leadership, strategic thinking, decision making, developing, motivation, coordination, networking/collaborating, compatibility, empathy, work ethic, teaching, and emotional intelligence.
- Personal skills: Professionalism, efficiency, time management, body language, stress management, attitude, discipline, self-awareness, understanding, organizing ability, and creativity.
Whether they are students, unemployed, or working professionals, it is not just companies that require soft skills but they are a need of every individual to function is any aspect of life. A study shows that two groups, students and women desire leadership training more.
In a Deloitte survey of millennials in 2016, it was observed that, 63% people said that they lack leadership skills.
On the job training, or learning and development, has become a mandate in every business. According to Deloitte’s global human capital trend report 2017, 90% of the companies are redesigning their organizations to be more team-centric and connected. This process is to be brought about by restructuring the learning and development strategies. Moreover, the recent pandemic has accelerated this process of learning.
Soft skills are what helps employees stay relevant and adapt, learn, and run with the pace of change. In 2020 and the years to come, soft skills are going to help employees save the business and help businesses hire great employees.
How Can We Help?
For the reasons discussed above, it is important for an employer to check the soft skill level of a candidate before selecting a software development assessment to test their skills. These skills can be assessed with online skill assessment tools like imocha. A number of tests, such as communications, aptitude, cognitive abilities, etc. can be administered to assess the proficiency level of employees.
We are the world's largest skills assessment API platform that helps organizations hire job-fit candidates, faster. The platform empowers organizations to thoroughly assess employees as well as candidates, essential to identify and benchmark their skills proficiency according to industry/company standards.
