Are hard skills or soft skills most important on the current global market? During the last centuries, job areas were more focused on manual work or repetitive gestures in, for example, factories. As time goes by, this kind of tasks has been outsourced to robots. Today, automation is everywhere. Skills such as collaboration, communicating with co-workers, active listening, presenting ideas are necessary and in-demand. Soft skills provide to work environments productivity, communication and healthy workplace, essential in our competitive world. Here are the Top 10 softs skills in-demand according to a Udemy report:
- Conflict management: manage differences between people when they collide each other is perhaps one of the hardest sides of the management. The Udemy report highlights how complex the workplace has become: multiple generations, different nationalities and cultures, various technologies, an ever-changing market…
- Time management: nothing new under the sun, time is valuable and manage your time is necessary.
- Stress management: an ever-changing market, new colleagues each year, big projects, long hours, endless meetings, communication issues… we always have something at work to become stressed and mad. Calm down, take a deep breath.
- Communication skills: crucial! Even more when our workplace is becoming increasingly diverse and complex.
- Company culture: creating a strong company culture is necessary for employee productivity and moral. People work better if colleagues are united around solid values and goals.
- Customer service: customer service is not the apanage of the commercial department. Somehow, most of us are interacting with customers every day: customers, suppliers, internally customers…
- Emotional intelligence: EI is the newcomer for the past few years. According to Peter Salovey and Mayer, EI is “the ability to monitor one’s own and other people’s emotions, to discriminate between different emotions and label them appropriately, and to use emotional information to guide thinking and behaviour”.
- Personal productivity: every day has to be useful and well managed. The feeling of having been effective during the day is priceless!
- Storytelling: technical and hard skills are essential to produce a work however when it comes to present the work produced, storytelling is vital.
- Change management: sometimes change is stressful, and we need to be prepared.
