What are Soft Skills?

Soft Skills are behaviors connected to social and emotional skills that a person has to have in order to get better in personal and professional life. Soft Skills express your personal attitude, your emotional and social skills. Hard Skills on the other hand are the technical skills, the knowledge of doing a trade or a job. For example, a good computer scientist knows how to program, an electrician knows how to fix electric wiring, etc., and these hard skills are used in a professional environment and were usually acquired through formal or self-learning processes.

Soft skills are acquired from our daily experiences, mainly during childhood and the development years, but they are developed throughout our life, either with informal, non-formal or even non formal cognitive processes.

In order to willingly develop our soft skills, firstly, we have to look in ourselves, to recognize what are our weakness and our strengths. Then depending on where we want to express our soft skills (work or personal life, but usually, these are deeply interconnected) to try to have experiences, to participate in trainings, by mentoring, by coaching to develop our skills. We need to have chance of experience. So, be active, be perseverant and never give up with developing yourself!

We also categorize soft skills according to larger groupings of soft skills, which are:

• Communication skills: speaking skills, active listening skills, reading skills, understanding skills, critical observation, open mindedness, positive attitude, respect, converting ideas into speech or writing, etc.
• Decision making skills: autonomy, planning skills, courage, creativity, problem solving, decision making, self-awareness, time management, leadership, motivational skills, negotiation skills, etc.
• Lifelong learning skills: taking responsibility for learning, learning through research, reflection and self-evaluation skills, self-confidence, openness to use technologies, converting information into knowledge, etc.
• Interpersonal skills: understanding one another, cooperation skills, leadership skills, teamwork, advocacy skills influencing skills, tolerance, empathy, emotional awareness, modesty, conflict resolution skills, negotiation skills, etc.

N.B. his categorization is in no way exhausting all soft skills and it is also not the only way of ordering soft skills. As visible in the list, some soft skills appear in more than one category. We created this grouped categorization in order to make more sense of soft skills.