Why develop soft skills and hard skills?
- July 29, 2024
- Posted by: Yury Subachev, PhD
- Categories: Education and trainings, For young scientists
Soft and hard skills are useful skills that help one to develop successfully in any professional sphere. Whereas in the past, the employee’s knowledge and skills of a narrow specialist were treated as the main advantages, now increasingly more employers want to see flexible, communicative and creative workers.
The terms soft skills and hard skills have become firmly embedded in our lives; therefore, it is necessary to understand the specifics and differences of these concepts. The article explains the meaning of these terms, in what way they differ and what qualities are actually needed for career advancement.
At the end of the 20th century, enormous changes took place in the approach to the concept of “professionalism”. Until then, it was customary in the Soviet Union to work all one’s life in one place and develop as a specialist only in one chosen field.
Today, things are different. It is possible to acquire knowledge and learn a new discipline online within a short time. Dedicated specialists are no longer in great demand because of their limited abilities and skills. When looking for a job, it is increasingly common to encounter such concepts as soft skills and hard skills. What are these?
Soft skills are “flexible” or “demand-responsive” skills that are not related to professional abilities but are extremely useful for working with people and solving life problems. No matter how perfect you are as a professional, you cannot succeed in your career without soft skills. The term ‘soft skills’ means the ability to find a common language with colleagues, bosses and clients, to be soft and adapt to any circumstances.
Hard skills are professional qualities required to perform direct job-related tasks. The list of “hard” skills is different for every speciality. For a construction worker, it is the ability to handle different tools and materials, and for a designer, it is the ability to draw and use graphic editors. Hard skills are those that can be mastered within a certain time, and their effectiveness is measured by the result of performed work. They represent sustainable skills clearly defined by the employer and included in the list of requirements and job descriptions.
Experts from reputable universities have revealed that 85% of success in any professional sphere is accounted for by soft skills, with only 15% left to hard skills. Google carried out research to identify the most efficient departments within a company. As a result, it was found that the productivity rating was headed by departments with well-developed soft skills; the identified key skills were sociability, leadership and empathy.
The excellent knowledge of how to write software code will not help one to become a project manager, as compared with well-developed social skills.
2. How to develop soft skills and hard skills?
It is believed that soft skills have their origin in childhood and are linked to emotional intelligence. Soft skills are developed throughout one’s life in the process of gaining life experience since it is very difficult to master certain qualities at a training course. Therefore employers particularly value employees having soft skills.
Nevertheless, it is possible to develop soft skills in adulthood. Below are the most valuable soft skills and the ways of their improvement:
1. Sociability – exchange of information between people by means of a dialogue; it is used not only in business but also in ordinary life. Communication is necessary for establishing contacts, meeting human needs and performing most tasks. Communication includes negotiation skills and public speaking. To develop this skill, you need to talk more extensively, make presentations, participate in discussions at conferences and take an active part at cocktail parties after conferences.
2. Critical thinking – the ability to process information, to get to the core. This skill will help you to think rationally, take a balanced approach to scientific investigation, adduce arguments and find optimal solutions to scholarly problems. To level up critical thinking, you need to develop outsight and logic, learn to ask questions and analyse others’ behaviour.
3. Customer focus – the ability to guess the desires of the boss or manager. The ability to satisfy the needs of your audience increases competitiveness. It is necessary to analyse what is required by consumers from different spheres of life, guess their requests and learn to solve people’s problems.
4. Project management – the ability to distribute responsibilities and organise the work of subordinates, graduate students and other specialists towards the achievement of the common goal. Projects are everywhere around you – from scientific problems to mundane cares (packing for a trip, building a house); for this, you need to involve several people from different spheres and interact with each of them. To develop this skill, it is useful to arrange all your activities in the form of projects and involve assistants or prepare for certain tasks in advance.
5. Tutorship – teaching others what you can do yourself. It is easier and faster to learn new skills with the help of a tutor. Teaching others and sharing your knowledge with others is useful for the ability to share responsibilities and for adapting your team for a common project. Start developing this skill with yourself, make a plan to learn something new and follow it, and record the results. After that, invite your friends or colleagues to train this skill.
6. Nonforcible communication is the ability to convey information to interlocutors, to achieve your goals without offending others. The core of nonforcible communication is the ability to share an insight with an interlocutor, back it up with facts, talk about your need and ask for help. Start developing the skill by understanding yourself, empathising and asking your friends for assistance.
7. Decision-making – the ability to make a well-informed choice and take responsibility for it; this is useful for achieving goals. To develop this ability, learn to discern a large number of possible options and choose the best one by prioritising.
8. Problem-solving – the ability to overcome difficulties and take action instead of complaining. The better this quality is developed, the more problems can be dealt with. The skill is related to project management and decision-making. To level it up, it is useful to write down a few life difficulties and propose about 20 solutions to handle them within a fixed timeframe. If this does not work you need to find another way to cope with the problem.
9. Emotional Intelligence – the ability to understand people’s intentions and emotions and manage them. This skill will facilitate communication, decision-making and fulfilment of practical tasks. To develop it, learn to feel yourself and others, analyse and control your emotions.
10. Learnability – disposition towards absorbing new information and applying it in real life. Knowledge management makes it easy to select and sort information sources and build training plans. You should start by making a plan and identifying the missing knowledge; it is useful to test all theories for yourself.
11. Working in uncertainty mode – the ability to react quickly to changes in conditions, to be soft and adapt to any circumstances. To develop this skill, you need to work on your independence, add new tools in this process and think through the action plan in advance.
12. Lean management – the ability to cope with losses, find the ways out of any situation and improve ongoing processes. The skill is useful for saving human and production resources. With proper distribution of tasks, a person has more time and is less tired. To develop this skill, it is useful to organise personal space, keep clean, get rid of unnecessary things, sort things out, keep things organised and add conveniences to your life.
13. Ecological thinking – the ability for a considerable and mindful approach that excludes harming the environment and yourself; being responsible for your actions and enjoying the achieved results. To develop this ability, you need to learn to see good things in any situation, without negation of the negative.
14. Self-reflection – the ability to analyse and evaluate own actions. This skill helps to develop awareness and make the right decisions. To develop this quality, it is useful to record your actions and behaviour in detail, keep a diary and note people whom you are grateful to for something.
Every soft skill is developed stepwise and requires regular practice. The more extensive the practical application, the better the ability is levelled up.
Hard skills are shaped for specific tasks during training periods at any stage of one’s life, being based on technical assignments. To develop the skills, you are lacking for a particular job, you can take special professional development courses, tutorial workshops, online training seminars. Every training course ends with a review of the learned material. You can achieve the automaticity of hard skills with regular practice.
Whereas “soft” skills require ongoing training and their progress is difficult to trace, “hard” skills mastery is visible as they develop.
3. What is the difference between soft skills and hard skills, which of them is more important?
To understand the difference between “soft” and “hard” skills, one should get to know their features.
In particular, soft skills are characterised as follows:
- well-developed emotional intelligence (or a disposition to this);
- the ability to adapt to a specific situation or a specific audience;
- the skill-shaping success depends on one’s personal qualities and life experience;
- it is quite difficult to demonstrate or track the presence of soft skills;
- achieving a high level or proper development of this skill is not guaranteed;
- retroaction or regression is possible under specific conditions;
- their development takes a slow path.
Hard skills are characterised as follows:
- mastering this skill requires logic, intelligence and a high IQ;
- one can verify the development of such qualities by means of a test, examination or evaluation procedure;
- these abilities are permanent, they do not depend on external conditions or people;
- new skills are acquired by learning new material and analysing information;
- knowledge is gained quickly, securely and with less effort if some basic requirements are met;
- these skills show a person’s competence in a particular field.
To cope with any task with ease, one needs to duly combine both “soft” and “hard” skills; they must complement each other.
According to a relevant American theory, the difference is that hard skills are needed for working with technicality items, while soft skills are needed for interacting with people and handling paperwork. In addition, the importance of personal or professional skills depends on one’s sphere of work:
1. The predominance of “hard” skills is important for those professions where it is necessary to cope with tasks responsibly, while sociability and teamwork are not required. Examples include nuclear physicists, engineers or programmers.
2. “Soft” qualities are predominant, in the first place, in representatives of sales industries and creative specialities, managers, politicians and businessmen. Education is not so important here as the ability to present oneself and find a common language with people.
3. The balance of “soft” and “hard” skills is indispensable not only for such professionals as lawyers, economists and project managers, where both professional and personal abilities are important, but also for anyone else (including academics and teachers) – for a successful career and building good relationships with colleagues.
4. In plain words: examples of real skills
Analysing real examples of “soft” and “hard” skills is the easiest way to understand what soft skills and hard skills are, in what way they differ and how they help in professional development.
Examples of soft skills:
- the ability to find a common language with people, to negotiate;
- teamwork, leadership qualities;
- time management (the ability to manage one’s time);
- permanent learning;
- stress tolerance;
- tact and flexibility;
- the ability for diplomacy.
Examples of hard skills:
- knowledge of foreign languages;
- proficiency in specialised software (for charting or creating conference presentations);
- the ability to handle machinery (microscopes, test machines, etc.);
- fast typing;
- solving mathematical problems.
Conclusion
Knowledge about soft and hard skills is important for people who want to get a decent job and progress successfully up the career ladder. These terms can be found in Russian CVs and adverts, being understood as “personal qualities” and “professional skills” respectively.
It is believed that hard skills are easy to acquire at any stage of life, while soft skills are vested in an individual and developed from childhood, so it is more difficult to improve them. Therefore, most employers today increasingly appreciate the presence of “soft”, personal qualities in addition to highly specialised knowledge.
In fact, it is important to combine both soft and hard skills; only a balance of skills will help to achieve good career development results (although there are a number of professions for which only soft or hard skills are more important).
