How to Balance Soft Skills Through your Career

Soft skills can boost your career and make you stand out from the crowd.

Most of us have the wrong assumption that soft skills are more likely to relate to human resources areas and management teams. As the organizations evolve and we walk in direction to an automated and digital work environment, the development of soft skills abilities became an essential asset to hold.

Technology is in constant evolution; a great part of our technical tasks will be automated soon. It doesn’t mean that human workers will be replaced, but professionals can get better chances if they develop their critical thinking, creativity, analytical and leadership skills, just mentioning a few of them. The construction of these sets of knowledge didn’t happen in one goal, one course, it’s a mindset towards learning and how you can adapt your skills to fit in this context.

The “what workers want Ireland report 2019” published by Hays Recruitment found out that emotional intelligence is a foremost consideration for 43% of employers in Ireland, while 41% prioritize critical thinking for future roles. These are the type of skills that can be developed through training and being exposed to leadership and professional development content.

According to Alan Deery, CEO of New Horizons Ireland, professionals, in general, should consider mastering leadership skills since the start of their careers, it doesn’t matter where they are on the career ladder. “Most of the time professionals start to think about soft skills later in their careers and what we see now is that companies are prone to hire professionals with a leadership attitude, even for positions that are not management-related”, reported Deery.

Leadership Skills Associate with Early-Career

In the early stages of a career technical skills are essential and it will bring you recognition. But if you really want to stand out from the crowd consider some investment in soft skills too, such as communication and decision-making, as well as your operational skills, like your ability to produce high-quality work and hit deadlines. Business leaders and HR managers are looking for these profiles.

Spend your early career focusing on courses that can improve both your professional development and operational skills can be an advantage to achieve your goals. Look into leadership training on effective communication, becoming more strategic in your decision-making, going above and beyond at work and time management.

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Mid-Career Leadership Skills

Work positions and companies are much more volatile today than 5 years ago, but the structure still irrelevant, hierarchy and position play a big role in most of the organizations. As you move into the middle of your career, the most important thing for you to learn is how to manage your projects more productively and how to coach others on your team, even if you aren’t a manager.

You should become good at inspiring others to act or voice their own ideas, enabling you to put together and lead an effective team. It’s expected that you’ve got a better handle on communication skills. Therefore, you can translate those skills into opportunities to help grow others professionally.

Combine your coaching abilities with project management skills, and you’ll be able to help your teams traverse any project moving forward. With project management, your team will be able to manage deadlines and seek out the right resources, rather than missing opportunities or choosing to prioritize the wrong task.

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Late-Career Leadership Skills

As you move away from the middle of your career and into senior management strategy is the key. While you’ve probably learned a little about strategic decision-making before now, you need to dive deep into skill sets that revolve around your company’s overall health — not just how to lead your teams. You’ll need to embrace the concept of continuous improvement and learn how to make necessary and impactful strategic decisions.

Key late-career leadership skills include analyzing financial health, marketing, interpreting industry data sets and knowing when to make tough decisions that will affect how your business runs.

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Considering the data from the “what workers want Ireland report 2019” published by Hays Recruitment of all the soft skills 67% of employers consider emotional intelligence to be the shortest supply, closely followed by people management (63%) and critical thinking (61%).

Soft skills are not just useful for career development, it's proven to have a great impact on relationships in general and even managing personal life and goals. Skills, such as time management are great for all spheres of life, not just work-related tasks. Knowing how to communicate well, for example, can be great for parents in their daily routine with the kids, mentioning just a few.

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