“Soft Skills” have become one of the most used words in professional life as well as sought-after skills of the present time. What is soft skill anyway? Well, when I was googling on this, I came across a number of puzzling, vague, complicated definitions which might put one into confusion to have a clear idea about it.
As a soft skills trainer, what I feel and share in my training is, soft skills are a set of ‘life skills’ which will make your life easy, comfortable, happy and of course, successful to get along with anybody and everybody of the world. Whoever you are, unless you are a cave man, you have to go through three lives: your personal or family life, professional life and social life. To be successful in all these three spheres of life, you have to have very good verbal and non-verbal communication skills because you simply can’t afford not having these skills. If you don’t have these skills, only one person on the earth will be in danger and that is you! And there lies the importance of knowing and brushing up on soft skills. Soft skills are learned skills, so you have room and opportunity throughout your entire life to fine-tune and sharpen them. According to Carnegie Institute of Technology, Michigan, USA, “85% of your financial success is due to your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate and lead; shockingly, only 15% is due to technical knowledge.” Really shocking, isn’t it? Well, that doesn’t obviously say that you don’t need technical skill which is your hard skills. Of course, you need them but to sell your technical skills (IT skill, medical skill, engineering skill, mathematical skill, drawing skills etc), you must have a good grip on your soft skills. So, soft skills are the gateway to sell your hard skills.
Now, what does include soft skills? Let’s say, what not? As it is life skills, your each and every gesture, posture, verbal, non-verbal communication is part of your soft skills. For example, the way you stand, the way you sit, the way you look, the types of dresses you wear, even the perfume you wear is part of your soft skills. Suppose, you wear a very strong perfume which can be smelled from 12 feet away and that is a totally wrong communication from your part because you wear perfume for yourself, not for other people. They should not be able to smell it until they stand very close to you. So, you see, it’s a wrong signal which will transmit a wrong message from your end. Same thing goes for having tea or food. Having tea with a hissing sound or food with a slurping sound will tell people that you don’t know dining etiquette which is a soft skill. According to Business Insider, “You Only Have 7 Seconds To Make A Strong First Impression”. They say, to nail any job interview and be remembered well here are seven things to do in those crucial seven seconds and these are: ‘smile, hand shake, eye contact, introduce yourself, speak clearly, look smart and sit down only when invited to’. What a challenge to accomplish! Well, be it seven second or 70 second, you have to know it and skillfully use it if you want to accomplish a successful professional life in this competitive world.
And this is the area where our present and would-be professionals find most difficult to deal with. Employers in Bangladesh have started paying focus on people skills, that is soft skills because they know, to procure business, convince buyer, win over customer, the first skill needed is interpersonal skill (a soft skill) and then comes product knowledge, that is technical skill (hard skill). Now, the point I would like to make here is, if our students start learning these soft skills from higher secondary level, they will be better communicator in all phases of their life which will ultimately be a huge help in their professional life afterwards. A recent study says, more than 40% graduates are unemployed in Bangladesh and this is still a reality when there is a job advertisement published by a state-run bank, more than two hundred thousand applicants apply for 200 positions.
I have mentioned above a few of the soft skills but there are many more such as, creativity, problem solving, leadership, negotiation and collaboration, adaptability, critical thinking, decisiveness, time management, body language, fostering integrity, courtesy and responsibility and the list goes on. But the ones I mentioned here are the essential ones. Hundreds of thousands of job applicants in Bangladesh still don’t know how to write a professional profile or CV. Most of them just copy it from others and hope to land a job interview having sent the copied one. CV is your professional portray, a list of your personal accomplishments. It has to be very much customised and you have to know the art of portraying your feats within one or two pages. Most of the CVs in Bangladesh are still three to five pages whereas an employer here spends less than thirty second to come up with a decision whether a CV will be kept on the desk or thrown to bin. And the applicant never knows what went wrong, why he/she didn’t get a call from employer. Same thing goes for another piece of soft skill named job interview skill. Lot of applicants go through the most common interview question and answers from google and think, preparation has properly been taken. Poor them! Each and every answer to a job interview question has to be customised, has to be your own story, your own feats. Instead of saying some vague adjectives, you have to come up with facts and figures of your life accomplishment and you have to have the smartness of linking them to that particular job. And this is a skill and yes, soft skill!
At the end, I would like to request the authorities concerned to introduce soft skills to our academic study from high school level which will open up all the horizons of our millions of potential students.
The writer is a Soft Skills Trainer and regular Contributor to Daily Sun
LinkedIn: zia-hasan/5a/709/919
