Soft Skills

By Daniela Camberos

Soft skills are character traits that individuals can work on acquiring through practice

such as, communication, time management, teamwork, creative thinking, leadership, and

timeliness. For example, to

develop timeliness, you can

prepare your things the night

before, set alarms, and/or, head

out earlier than “normal.” These

skills can be useful in all kinds of

situations; from taking your kids

to school, to doing your

homework on time, to registering PHOTO: THERESA CHIECHI / THE BALANCE(2)

for classes that you need, to obtaining a job, to being promoted at work, etcetera. They facilitate

interactions in the workplace, yet are not restricted to the job setting; they are a tool to ease

communication and behavior between people, and also help avoid conflict, accomplish tasks

more efficiently, and be innovative. In addition to that, soft skills are more demanded in the

majority of occupations. Therefore, possessing soft skills makes a person more qualified to attain

a job than those who lack these skills.

Importance
 Soft skills have an immense impact in people’s lives, they are the basis of good

communication and rationality. These skills not only affect a particular individual on a personal

level, but they affect people around that person as well. Soft skills are mostly important in the

workplace because lacking them can cause companies to lose millions of dollars.(1) For instance,

in the sciences, gaining recognition for your work – and by association for your company –

requires you to maintain a written record of the tasks performed and when they were performed;

if another company fabricates the same research, but they have dates and you do not, they will

get the funding or prize and your company will have missed the opportunity. Not being able to

master these skills could cause you to have a really bad impression – like having a bad attitude,

being unreliable, untrustworthy, clumsy, lazy, and/or unwilling – leading you to have a bad

reputation and others not wanting to work with you. Obtaining a job is not merely reliant on hard

skills; hard skills make you knowledgeable on a certain topic, they help you execute a task or

job(3), but they do not fully equip you with the tools to retain or advance in a career, relationships,

and life in general. For example, numerous of people can decode a program or some type of

website, but knowing such a thing does not benefit you in any way if you are not willing to work

with anyone, are always arguing with other people, are always late, are not able to communicate,

and do not finish work on time.

Sources

(1) Denisov, A. (2017, December 16). What Millennials are lacking: Soft Skills.

Linkedin.com.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-millennials-lacking-soft-skills-anatoly-denisov
(2) Doyle, A. (2022, October 9). What are soft skills? The Balance. Retrieved December 6,
2022, from https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-are-soft-skills-2060852
(3) (N.d.). Jobcase.com. Retrieved September 26, 2022, from

https://www.jobcase.com/articles/hard-skills-on-my-resume