Pure strategy will only get you so far. If you study hard, enhances awareness and character traits that contribute to your skills every day, and do your best to learn more, but haven’t reached the next stage of your career yet, your soft skills could be in jeopardy.

Soft skills include a combination of social skills, interpersonal skills, consciousness and character traits that contribute to social and professional life. They differ from hard skills in that they cannot be fully taught. Research published in The Economist magazine points out that in the 20th century, demands are much more focused on human and social skills. (Mckinsey)

While your tech skills (those programming skills that you have a hard time mastering) will largely determine whether you can perform specific tasks, your social skills will show whether your personality and work style will benefit the team.

The intangible technical skills you bring to the table are built into your personality, but can be improved with practice and training. Recruiters filling undergraduate or entry-level jobs often prefer candidates with strong social skills because they know they have the potential to develop.

“Presentation skills are fundamenal. The people who work for you represent your brand. You want them to present themselves – and represent you – in a certain way.”

Marc Benioff (Co-founder, President and Co-CEO of Salesforce, an enterprise cloud computing company. In September 2018, Benioff acquired Time Magazine).

Managers should always encourage teamwork. This should permeate the organization’s principles, goals and objectives as a true internal collaborative culture. Without it, efforts become tedious and inefficient, contributing little to better integration among members. When implemented as a culture, it is as if collaboration must be part of the structure of the company.

IT professionals are responsible for solving problems and ensuring the best performance of other workgroups, plus helping companies to become more competitive and achieve better results. However, to unify the organizational culture of this group, the following measures are necessary. Structuring internal processes, setting realistic goals, using communication, besides project management and communication tools.

IT professionals are responsible for solving problems and ensuring the best performance of other workgroups, helping companies to become more competitive and achieve better results. However, to unify the organizational culture of this group, the following measures are necessary: structuring internal processes, setting realistic goals, using communication, project management and communication tools.

“When everyone moves forward together, success happens on its own.”

Henry Ford, American industrialist and founder of the Ford Motor Company.

Communication

Communication is a skill that can be developed like many other soft skills. In this context, it differs from hard skills because a degree or specialization does not guarantee all the necessary knowledge. This is a skill that requires constant effort and constant learning. Even during working hours, communication skills can be improved.

It is recommended that conversations should always be transparent, to be effective, the professional needs to feel comfortable communicating with his colleagues, superiors and clients. Each department may require a slightly different approach: you don’t explain something to a non-technical customer as you would to a colleague. (NCERT)

Teaching Ability and Open Mind

Choosing to pursue a career in technology, you will need to constantly expand your skills and learn new things. You don’t just learn from the course, but also from your peers and superiors. The teachable readily admit that they still don’t know everything and enjoy learning from those around them, including their superiors and direct subordinates. The open-minded aspect is being able to listen to the opinions and ideas of others. If we properly listen and understand what others are saying, we have the opportunity to:

• Learn new things

• Build new ideas based on the ideas of others

• Be more efficient at the task at hand

• Decrease unnecessary discussions in meetings

Time management

IT professionals have the luxury of having a lot of freedom. Much freer than many other professions. Part of that freedom is the opportunity to manage time in a certain way. Managing our time means being able to prioritize critical tasks. It is very tempting to tackle the exciting tasks first and ignore the more important, less interesting ones. It is very common for IT professionals to stay in their technical den, and when very close to the deadline they realize that important parts of a project have been forgotten.

Time management also means controlling procrastination. As a software developer, you can read memes and watch cat videos for days on end. Procrastination can lead to panic about deadlines. Panic causes pain and shoddy work. (Forbes)

Networking

Many doors are opened with relationships. Meeting the “right” people inside and outside your company can have a huge impact on your career. Some benefits are: get better job opportunities, more contacts for your projects (for collaborations, as clients, etc.) help from someone who has no formal obligation to help you, Better chance of skipping some bad corporate bureaucracy, being introduced to other people.

One way to meet new people is to approach them when you come across their work. If you’ve watched an interesting lecture or read an article, you can email your colleagues to thank them and express your honest thoughts on the matter.

As important as developing Soft Skills, it is knowing how to identify them, both in the analysis of employees who are already members of a company, and during the capture of future talents. However, unlike technical training, these skills are not easily taught. The important thing is to keep in mind that soft skills are a reflection of continuous development and always subject to improvement.

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