Soft skills are needed everywhere. No matter what you do, how many degrees you have or the years of experience you have – if you don’t have the right set of tools to bring to the working table, it will be incredibly hard to keep moving forward and get the results you aim for.

Soft skills are personal attributes that enable you to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people, and these skills are often times even more important than the hard skills, such as negotiation and sales skills.

Wherever people are, soft skills are needed
if you take a good look around, you’ll see that the world we live and work in, evolves more around people, and less about the products. Sure, products are important, but without people feeling good about them, there wouldn’t be any products to sell. Even the rapid development of new technologies and emerging markets, such as virtual reality, self-driving cars and apps like Uber and AirBnB require not only people to use it, but moreover, people to make it. Things are needed to be done fast, yet thoroughly. The answer: soft skills.

Before I hand you the list of the 10 most required soft skills, I want you to imagine the following.

How would your work and the company you work in, be different if you were able to

• Communicate better with others, and others with you?
• Have less stress and more fulfillment?
• work more efficient with your team?
• know how to set and achieve all your goals?

I’m sure you can imagine the impact of having better results within the company that will translate to better results outside the company. And the best of it all is, that soft skills are learnable. No matter where you are right now, you can always develop and improve your soft skillset, and become a better professional.

The list of top 10 soft skills has been made by a study over the last 5 years, and well over 3 million application forms filled in by both small and big companies.

1. Communication skills
2. Flexibility
3. Team skills
4. Proactive
5. Enthusiasm
6. Passion
7. Analytical skills
8. Stress resistible
9. Social skills
10. Result oriented

It is important to know that not all of these soft skills are equally important for every company. Depending on the size, we can differentiate two categories: the small sized companies and the corporations.

When we look deeper under the hood of corporations, we can see that most often, the skills required for people are those that are highest ranked in the list above.

Not only do people need to be flexible, they require good communication skills to ensure that in the rapid changing work floor, things are handled easily, and effectively.

The skills match well with employees who are more task-oriented and do manual work.

When looking at smaller companies as well as the higher levels of corporations, we can see that other soft skills are needed, more valuable. These skills include stress resistance, analytical skills and result orientation.

You will find these soft skills essentially important, since they are for the professional that is required to work in a dynamic environment where change is the constant factor, and where only results truly count.

So how do you acquire soft skills, such as great communication skills, stress-resistance, analytical skills and focused result orientation? The simple and easy answer is, that you develop them.

As I stated earlier, soft skills are learnable. They are a set of skills that enhance and increase your capability to deal with situations better and faster, and become more successful and fulfilled in the process.

Knowing when to act, what to say, how to move forward, and where to empower others to stay on target is all driven by soft skills.

In this day and age, we can train people how to do things. This is called transactional education. You put in A, you get out B. But for most of us, that just doesn’t cut it anymore. We need something that doesn’t keep us on the same level of operation and success, we need to move forward, and climb the ladder of both achievement and fulfillment.

This type of thinking is called transformational education or knowledge. Information that, when applied, will help you transform into the person that has the abilities and skills to make that difference in their organizational environment. And the way to make this difference is, you guessed it, soft skills.

So, here’s today’s question to you: which of the soft skills from the list above do you want to develop most, and what do you aim to get out of it?

Leave your comment in the field below, and I’ll be sure to follow up on you.

To your success,

Robert

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