Soft skills are increasingly important to business success, a trend 80% of the talent professionals surveyed by LinkedIn in their 2019 Global Talent Trends report attest to. And it’s not hard to see why; two thirds of all jobs will be soft-skill intensive by 2030, as compared with only half in 2000, according to Deloitte Access Economics.
The growing demand for soft skills by business means employees need to upskill in equal measure to keep pace. Here are three in-demand soft skills and how you can improve yours.
Communication
If there’s a soft skill that’s fundamental to almost all business, communication is a prime contender for the title. Information has to flow through a business like oxygen and nutrients flow around the human body. Blood does the job in our bodies, but for the organism of the firm, its people are how information gets to where it needs to go. Bottom line, if you can’t communicate well, you won’t be able to play an integral role in a twenty-first century business.
Communication is one of the most fundamental soft skills employees should have.
How can you improve your communication skills?
Learning to communicate better can really only be accomplished one way: by practising. A good place to start is to ask for feedback from your peers and co-workers. What do you do well? What habits do you have that hinder communication? What could you do better? Once you have a better understanding of your weaknesses you can start to act on them and practise communicating with them in mind. In time, you will adopt those improved techniques and modes of communicating as a natural part of the way you act.
Always remember, communication is a two way street — you have to understand and listen to others just as well as you express and articulate your own ideas. A useful tip for listening well is to imagine you have to paraphrase and pass on what you’re being told to another party. Ask yourself: “have I understood what I’m being told well enough that I could say it in my own words and explain it to someone else?” If not, you need to ask for clarification. It’s subtle, but a mental trick like this can help you stay focused on listening instead of thinking of what you’re going to say in response.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking involves taking an objective look at something — an idea, a proposal, a course of action — and evaluating it as free from bias as possible. This ability is needed everywhere in business: you’re given a number of options to choose from by your boss; a client asks for your perspective on a project; a dispute between team members needs solving and you’re the one in charge.
How can you improve your critical thinking skills?
One of the best ways to think critically is to acknowledge our tendency to fall into confirmation bias. When we think we know the answer to something, we tend to look for evidence that supports our already-held conclusion. Unfortunately, this isn’t a useful way of thinking critically, because it can cause us to miss things that would show what we believe is wrong. Instead of only looking for corroborating evidence, ask yourself the question, “what would I except to see if this idea were false? What kind of evidence would show me that I’ve made a mistake in my thinking somewhere?” In other words, try and prove yourself wrong. If you can’t find any holes in your thinking, you can be more confident that you’re on the right track.
Teamwork
Alongside communication as a fundamental soft skill for business is teamwork. Whenever people need to work together to achieve their goals, effective teamwork skills are what there. A great team can do more than the sum of its parts, but only if the individual team members are able to play their part.
How can you improve your teamwork skills?
Like improving your communication skills, becoming a better team player takes time and practise. And once again, feedback is key to understanding how you can improve in your current environment. Even so, there are steps you can take in the meantime to improve how you interact with your teammates.
For a start, you can adopt a more open and transparent posture towards your team members. In order for teams to function well, communication between all the members needs to be open and honest. You also need to be responsible and accountable for the things you’ve been given to do. Other team members may be relying on you to get your part of the puzzle done.
How can you verify your soft skills?
Having the best soft skills in the game is great, but what use are they in getting a job if a potential employer doesn’t know you have them? A sentence on your CV isn’t going to be enough to convince your interviewer that you’ve got what it takes. But the difficulty in showing soft skills is not just a problem for jobhunters — 57% of the recruitment professionals surveyed in LinkedIn’s 2019 Global Talent Trends report say they struggle to accurately assess candidates’ soft skills.
This is alarming to hear when you consider how important those same professionals see them to business success, and that 89% of their bad hires typically lack the required soft skills. What can solve this problem for them? Candidates that can give proof of the soft skills they have, and that’s where Deakin’s micro-credentials can help.
Deakin University’s professional practice credentials verify the skills you have and give you a way to demonstrate them to potential employers. They cover a range of soft skills, including communication, critical thinking and teamwork, and can make the difference. An extensive evaluation process gives employers the peace of mind that the people with these credentials really do have the skills they say they do.
To learn more about our professional practice credentials, and how they can take you to the next level of your career, contact us today.