Corporate Trainings

What Are Soft Skills?

Soft skills tend to be more personality-focused, as opposed to being based on qualifications, technical skills, or vocational experience. That includes things like people skills, social skills, interpersonal skills, and transferable skills.

In contrast, hard skills are technical skills that are often job specific. They come from certification programs, employee training, and work experience and can be taught, measured, and tested through exams and practical assignments or quizzes.

Hard skills tend to relate to the core business of an organization, such as writing skills, computer networking skills, machine operation, business analysis, design, and construction. Soft skills deal more with interpersonal relationships and involve things like conflict resolution, communication, listening, and problem-solving.

In short, these are some key differences between hard skills and soft skills:

Top Soft Skills That Will Improve Your Employees’ Performance

That list showed you some significant benefits of soft skills training, but what competencies should you concentrate on with your employees to actually achieve all of those gains?

LinkedIn recently published a list of the most in-demand soft skills, and leadership, communication, collaboration, and time management came out as the ones employers were actively seeking. Now let’s take a closer look at the specific skills you should consider training your employees in.

1. Leadership

2. Communication

3. Teamwork

4. Time management

5. Problem solving

6. Critical thinking

The problem is that many people still think of these types of skills as innate qualities rather than something that can be learned – they consider that a person is either born with them or not. Fortunately, nothing could be further from the truth, as all of the most in-demand soft skills can be trained and developed.

There are a number of options for delivering soft skills training to your workforce. You can dedicate entire courses solely to soft skills, or you can add relevant soft skill sections to your existing course content. In terms of delivery methods, consider using some of the options outlined below:

1. Coaching/Mentoring

If you identify an employee who has a development need for a specific soft skill like leadership, you can consider bringing in a mentor or coach and tailor a learning approach that’s specific and targeted. The coaching process in the workplace typically implies collaboration with the employee to identify, target, and plan for better performance.

This is how it works: A coach defines the employee’s goals, existing skill sets, strengths, and, of course, weaknesses. For example: the employee finds out that he/she is not good enough at communicating with the staff supervised, so a coach creates a development strategy and provides him/her with a clear pathway to improve their communication skills. When an employee is on their way to implement this strategy, a trainer supports them and provides them with actionable feedback.

Coaching/mentoring is especially effective in imparting soft skills, such as communication and leadership.

2. Live interactive workshops

If you want to train an entire group of employees in a specific soft skill, you can organize live workshops. The best workshops have a concrete, action-oriented purpose and aim to find answers to current problems in the field.

Let’s say you want to teach your customer service staff how to resolve conflicts with clients. You can work out role-play scenarios and play them out right in the workshop. Let the supervisor or learning and development representative be a disgruntled customer and your employees will have to try to settle the conflict. Based on their responses, the trainer will be able to bridge skill gaps and point them in the right direction.

3. Peer (social) learning

Another effective yet simple way of developing soft skills is to learn with other people. Research has shown there is a significant link between having fun in the workplace and informal learning. You can take advantage of this by creating streams of work or small-scale projects that require collaboration between colleagues at work. Or you can undertake social learning online via the use of social apps and other tools.

For example, launch a peer forum where employees will discuss soft skills in the workplace and how to achieve their full potential. They will have a place to ask questions and share stories to get peer-based feedback. For instance, an employee encountered a particularly difficult customer who got on his/her nerves. He/she can share his/her experience on the forum, discuss it with colleagues, and get useful advice for the future.