

Whether you're an individual contributor or a people manager, you have to work with other people - in meetings, in brainstorms, and on various cross-functional projects within your company. You might not have known it when you were fighting over blocks or figuring out the rules of a made-up game, but you were actually preparing for a lifetime of workplace collaboration. The ability to play well with others is a soft skill you've been working on - unknowingly - since your first day of pre-school or daycare. (Take this quiz to rate your emotional intelligence and identify areas where you can improve.) In an analysis of new employees who didn't meet expectations during the first 18 months on the job, 23% failed due to low emotional intelligence. It might not sound like the most important skill for job growth and success, but in some cases, it is.



Practice is the best way to acquire soft skills and demonstrate them effectively. This is why acquiring soft skills is so unique. However, it's not as cut and dry when you'll use soft skills because they are dependent upon intangible factors. When you're hired for an accounting job, you know that most days you'll need to the do hard skills you learned in school like mathematical formulas, bookkeeping, and probably some work in a spreadsheet application. Soft skills are unlike hard skills in that they require situational awareness to know when to use which skill. So we've rounded up a list of the soft skills most critical to building a successful career - and how you can acquire them. You need hard skills to land a job, but you need soft skills to progress in your career. They can even be tied directly to the business's bottom line.īut when it comes to soft skills - things like small talk, empathy, and flexibility - they're not an exact science, but they're just as impactful. With hard skills, you can learn advanced techniques and methods that yield measurable results. Soft skills can be taught, but they're not as straightforward as hard skills which are the specific qualities that can be clearly defined, measured, and taught for success in a job. Soft skills are the combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, emotional intelligence, and personality traits that make it easy to get along and work harmoniously with other people.
