What Are Soft Skills?

Soft skills are non-technical skills linked to personality and character traits. In the workplace, these traits determine how well you get along with coworkers, how you adapt to changes and how quickly you can think on your feet.

Entry-level candidates are often evaluated on their soft skills. Which is why having most, if not all, of the hard skills required for a job doesn’t necessarily guarantee success. For example, suppose a job candidate fulfills most of the job description’s technical requirements, but struggles with collaborating in a team setting? The failure to partner with team members could lead to poor quality work, missing project deadlines and potentially employee dismissals.

Employers tend to seek candidates with a balance of hard and soft skills. Hard skills are measurable traits and learned abilities that you'd get from advancing your education or completing training programs. You’ll need to have learned skills to find a job in a specific industry. For example, if you’re interested in an accounting job, you’d be expected to have an understanding of accounting best practices, budgeting software and planning techniques.

Soft skills, however, aren’t acquired through education alone. Many of these traits, such as communication and critical thinking, are developed through practice and are generally transferrable throughout your career.

Soft skills may help employees perform better at their jobs and provide the necessary traits to pursue their goals. Here are a just a few that are frequently sought-after by skilled professionals:

Creativity is the ability to think outside of established boundaries. It allows people to find new ways that are more effective or innovative than what has been done before. For example, creative individuals tend to be curious and open-minded. They may also possess artistic abilities.

Here are a couple of ways you can improve your creativity:

Persuasion involves convincing others to adjust their point of view. People who are persuasive are helpful because they can create change in a company. For example, they may use their persuasion skills to land a contract with an important client or increase sales.

Here’s how you can improve your persuasion skills:

Having a collaborative mindset can help you and your colleagues work more effectively, increase productivity and create healthy relationships. When disagreements and roadblocks arise, collaborative professionals seek out ways to resolve the situation and get the project back on track.

Try these tactics to help improve your collaboration skills:

Adaptability is being able to quickly learn new behaviors in the face of changing circumstances. It also helps you to shift focus and learn new skills to support growth within your role and company. Adaptable people tend to be optimistic, flexible and have a growth mindset.

Here’s what you can do to improve your adaptability skills:

Refining your soft skills can help give you an edge as you move forward in your career. If an employer has two applicants with similar backgrounds, the applicant with more soft skills may have an advantage. In fact, a report by iCIMS Hiring Insights found that 75% of recruiters have cut an interview short because a candidate didn't have the required soft skills for the position.

Compared to hard skills, soft skills are considered more challenging to learn, measure and evaluate. You may have already developed some traits through school, job experience or naturally possess them due to your personality. However, if you lack experience or are just entering the job market, here are ways you can improve:

At DeVry, our degree programs are designed to help you hone your soft skills as you advance your hard skills in your chosen area of study. Classes start every 8 weeks – contact us to learn more.