Your professional life has and will continue to change as the world adjusts to its “new normal.” Roles introduced today are not the same as in the past, but it’s not exactly easy to pick up a new suite of skills for these positions.
Today’s tasks require more creativity, innovation, and complex relationship-building. Jobs are analytical and unpredictable, requiring a higher level of problem-solving and collaboration with diverse teams. As work changes, so will the skills necessary to do it.
So how are you going to persevere and stay relevant in a changing landscape?
Transferable skills — also known as soft skills — are one way to make yourself stand out and future-proof your career path. Whether you’re starting as a new grad or are looking to change careers, soft skills are the key to success.
Here’s a list of transferable skills that will make you an asset at any company:
1. Human Skills
These include skills like collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking. People who can bridge technology and humanity have an advantage in an increasingly digital world.
2. Agility and Adaptability
The world is so complex and unpredictable. Companies need employees who can adapt to disruptions — or pandemics — redefine strategy, and learn new skills on demand. This adaptability also includes being open to new ideas.
3. Social Intelligence
Even with technology, having employees who can build relationships will always be critical. No industry can replace the human touch required to interact with clients and solve complex problems in a team. Social intelligence is where you get an edge.
Your previous work experiences are full of examples of soft skills, from data visualization to company presentations.
4. Assessing and Analyzing Information
Data is everywhere, to the tune of 1.7 MB of data per person per second in 2020. Someone needs to make sense of it all. Analytical staff who can translate data into concepts and trends — or manipulate and visualize it on a computer — are invaluable. Companies need people who can see the bigger picture and connect the dots.
5. Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurs take risks, manage uncertainty, and adjust rapidly. They are also persuasive, exhibit leadership, are goal-oriented, and perform well in personal interactions. Entrepreneurship hits nearly every soft skill needed in current and future positions.
6. Growth Mindset
People with a growth mindset believe their abilities can be developed with hard work, have a passion for lifelong learning, and are resilient. They are motivated to adapt and find solutions for novel situations, making them the perfect employees for a rapidly changing world.
You may wonder how soft skills are evaluated in the hiring process. Companies don’t exactly share that they’re looking for someone with good social intelligence. The hiring process is where technical skills and soft skills work together. Technical skills qualify an applicant for a position, and soft skills are what set that applicant apart and will lead to career success.
In other words, technical skills might be the foundation of your routine tasks — writing a blog post, coding an app, or setting a broken bone, for example. Soft skills come in when you’re interviewing a source, explaining your app’s use cases to investors, and creating a treatment plan to support the healing process.
Soft skills are best outlined in your cover letter or during an interview. You can also include them in the Skills section of your resume alongside your technical skills.
Don’t think you use your soft skills very often? Consider the following interview questions:
- Give an example of when you had to communicate a setback to a customer.
- Talk about how you would handle working with a difficult co-worker.
- How do you handle stressful situations at work?
These structured behavioral interview questions are opportunities to showcase your soft skills — in fact, any scenario-based interview question is.
How do high-volume hiring situations possibly accommodate asking about soft skills? If they use Knockri, the automated video interview process is entirely based on skills and behaviors. Candidates are asked structured behavioral interview questions and scored according to skills like Problem Solving, Innovation, and Collaboration. Book a demo to learn more about how our pre-employment assessment tool can benefit recruiters and candidates by letting applicants showcase their soft skills.
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