A joint research brief by Longitude fellows Maddie Turner and Elijah Sales from Rice University.
Introduction
Entering the workforce or starting a new career can be extremely daunting. Not knowing exactly which skills employers are looking for, many job applicants are unsure of where their experiences and talents can take them. Students, especially, often worry about what they can “bring to the table,” leading to feelings of discouragement during the job-searching process. What should students focus on when looking to develop a skill set that will appeal to potential employers?
When someone asks you about your skills, technical —or “hard”— skills, such as computer programming or data analysis, are typically what you think of first. These are quantifiable skills developed throughout your education and training that are necessary to succeed in a particular field of study. “Soft skills,” a second category, are harder to define but just as important; these are more personal attributes that make you more productive and easier to work with, such as communication skills, time management, and creative thinking. While hard skills often come to mind more easily than soft skills (they are easier to list on a resume, and easier for employers to verify), the growing consensus is that soft skills are more important for long-term success in any field. In a webinar held by the Greater Houston Partnership titled “Understanding Skills to Navigate the Changing Nature of Work,” several professionals emphasized the importance of recognizing soft skills both as an employee and employer. Mandy Williams, a managing partner at RED+BLACK and featured speaker in the webinar, addressed the abundance of talented individuals with remarkable soft skills who have missed opportunities because they did not convey them effectively. Recognizing the significance of soft skills allows prospective employees to gain confidence in themselves and put their best foot forward in any job they apply for. By honing your soft skills and highlighting them to potential employers, opportunities simply become endless.
Methods
Longitude.site is a program that allows undergraduate fellows to conduct interviews with professionals across various fields, mainly through Skype or Google Hangouts. We selected ten transcripts of these interviews to explore insights from a wide range of fields—such as consulting, engineering, and finance—about the skills most used in the workplace. These insights were then grouped based on the larger themes that emerged, which included teamwork, adaptability, and communication, among several others. To gain a better understanding of each interviewee’s message, a brief takeaway highlighting the prevalent theme was added to each insight.
Results and Discussion
After coding the selected transcripts, we discovered that while a few interviewees discussed specific hard skills that they use on a daily basis, the most prevalent skills mentioned were communication, teamwork, flexibility, and problem-solving, all of which are considered soft skills. This was quite an interesting discovery considering the diversity in the interviewees’ areas of expertise, and demonstrates that soft skills are applicable to virtually any field. It is a given that some level of technical skill in one’s field is necessary for success. However, according to our interviewees, soft skills have the ability to amplify one’s hard skills, allowing for smoother collaboration with others and more efficient learning on the job.
Writing and Communication Skills
College students are often jokingly told that there are no jobs available for humanities majors post-graduation. As developing technology continues to revolutionize all aspects of the modern-day workforce, increasing emphasis is placed upon technical and computing skills, designed to streamline workflow and process large amounts of data in a short period of time. Despite that, the most common skill mentioned by our interviewees was verbal and written communication, even in traditionally “tech-heavy” fields. Vivas Kumar, a member of the Battery Team at Tesla at the time of his interview, has found that in his position, “Convincing people is always the really tough part [of business negotiations] and you need more than just engineering talent to be able to solve those types of problems.” While specific hard skills are undoubtedly important for success in tech, good communication skills allow you to explain your ideas clearly and effectively, to connect with people across backgrounds and cultures, and to advocate for yourself and your company. In particular, effective writing reflects an ability to organize your thoughts and keep track of complex concepts. Amy Boratko (literary manager at Yale Repertory Theatre) explains: “I feel like there’s such a link between clear writing and thinking, and the writing skills are something that’s so important to be able to clearly convey your ideas.” Whether you aim to become a novelist or an engineer, communication using various mediums will always be important for professional success.
Like many soft skills, Kumar says, communication skills are best improved through hands-on practice. “When it comes to things like doing negotiations, if you think you’re going to learn how to do that in a classroom, you’re wrong…The only way you can do that is through real-world experience,” he said. You can only improve your interpersonal skills through practice, taking every opportunity to reach out to others and learn more about them, as well as seeking out feedback from friends and colleagues. No matter what field you decide to pursue, you will never be working completely alone; the best way to leverage this is through strong communication.
Teamwork/leadership skills
In the same vein, understanding group dynamics and being a good team player is another important part of successfully integrating into a new position. Many companies organize employees into teams in order to improve efficiency, placing those with varying areas of expertise together in ways that complement everyone’s skill sets. However, the best way to make a team truly effective is to ensure that every member understands the goals to meet and has the resources they need to be successful, as Boratko points out in her interview.
“I think teamwork requires transparency and…involves a constant checking in on what the dynamic is,” she said. “So if you are leading the team, you need to be looking at the team and seeing who’s participating, who’s not, who’s fading away, who has a voice, who isn’t having a voice in that moment.” Whether you are a team leader or team member, staying in tune with your co-workers and understanding where they struggle and excel allows you to bring out the strengths in each of them.
Jarvis Sam, another interviewee and currently the vice president of global diversity and inclusion at Nike, explained that over the course of his professional career he has observed that good leadership is almost always accompanied by transparency and authenticity. “People just want to know that you’re keeping it real with them and offering effective visibility into what you’re working on, how they’re being evaluated, and how that’s serving the larger business.” Most importantly, though, there must be accountability on behalf of both team members and leaders. What does that look like?
“For me, accountability is really being a kind leader,” Sam said. As a team leader, you are not only responsible for the success of your project, but for the success of the people you work with; one cannot occur without the other. Staying attuned to and invested in the people around you is a valuable skill in today’s increasingly collaborative work environment, especially during the era of Covid-19. As many teams transition to a hybrid mixture of half in-person, half working-from-home, being able to coordinate and rely on whoever is physically in the office on a given day becomes even more crucial.
Flexibility/adaptability
In any field, you are bound to run into unprecedented roadblocks that throw your best-laid plans by the wayside. In these situations, you must be able to adapt to changing situations rather than falling apart without a plan or script to work from. Ellie Weeks, a senior digital product consultant at Deloitte, reflected that when getting started in consulting at Infosys, she often worked on projects that tested her skills in unexpected ways.
“Every single project I was on at Infosys, even though it was all retail, every single one was different in technology that we were working with,” she said. “I was on some that weren’t really technology-based, they were more strategy…You’re able to sample many types of industries, many types of projects, and types of work as well as other companies.” Though she wasn’t necessarily expecting to have to tackle technological and strategic challenges, being open to doing so allowed her to gain exposure to multiple industries and companies. Both Ellie and Vivas also mentioned the value of being able to adapt to a diverse and changing workforce.
“Someone who is just focused on a specific segment for a specific sector and is unwilling to think outside of that segment or sector is unlikely to succeed in the long term in our increasingly globalized world,” Kumar said.
While it may seem that specializing and gaining extensive experience in one particular hard skill would differentiate you from other potential candidates for a position in your field, our interviewees emphasized that it is often more important to be flexible, willing to tackle any problem thrown at you even if you aren’t sure you have the level of skill necessary to be successful at first. In the long run, this repeated exposure and adaptation to new challenges will make you an all-around stronger employee who can anticipate changes and respond with creative solutions.
Problem-solving/resilience
Throughout the process of reviewing these interviews, we noticed that all of the soft skills mentioned are connected in that they make you a better problem solver, another skill mentioned by many of our interviewees. Good communication skills empower you to connect with those you might not see eye-to-eye with at first. Understanding teamwork and group dynamics can help you defuse tension between coworkers. Being flexible allows you to adapt quickly to changes in plans, even if they aren’t in your area of expertise. Hard skills indeed help you solve problems related to your field of study (troubleshooting a software issue or fixing a mistake in a line of code), but as Adrian Galindo—an avionics engineer at Blue Origin—told us, the problems that you’re facing won’t always be industry-specific.
“The vast majority of engineering is not really the design side of things. The vast majority of engineering is understanding the problem, making sure you’ve agreed on how you are going to solve the problem with somebody else.” Even in such a technical field, Galindo most often finds himself solving problems with people and not with individual hard skills. Eric Li, who works in education, currently as a senior product manager at Credible, has had a similar experience in his career:
“Every day might bring a different challenge, with a different person, constraint, etc., so being able to think about whatever problem and create a plan to resolve it, work with people, etc., is something I do every day,” he said.
Conclusion and Takeaways
In a perpetually evolving workforce, rising standards for career experience and technical skills have made the job search experience increasingly intimidating. Many find it difficult to look past their hard skills and often stop there when presenting themselves to employers, when in fact, it is their soft skills they should be highlighting. To truly stand out and succeed in any future position, students must realize that the technical skills that make them the best artist, engineer, consultant, et cetera can only take them so far. Soft skills make you a better all-around employee rather than proficient in one specific area, while simultaneously coordinating the people around you, allowing them to work to the best of their abilities. These skills will not only propel you to success in any job but will also lead to personal growth regardless of your current knowledge and skill set.
Many of our interviewees recalled a specific event or real-world experience that helped them to develop their soft skills rather than a course or workshop. Such experiences often came in the form of challenges they encountered while working in their positions, which shows that getting hired does not necessarily mean that you have everything it takes to succeed at the outset. Any job is an opportunity to grow and hone your skills by facing the real challenges that often obstruct a company’s path to success. Employers want to see that you have the potential to improve as you constantly learn new things, interact with others, and accomplish major tasks, all of which are facilitated by soft skills. By gaining real-world experiences, especially interpersonal experiences, employees are more likely to realize what soft skills they need to develop or improve upon and apply those skills more effectively in future endeavors.
The true value of soft skills lies in the formation of these interpersonal connections. Communicating and connecting effectively with others provides you with the tools and resources necessary to use your technical skills to the best of your ability. Excellent writing and communication skills allow you to precisely express your ideas to those who can put them into action; good teamwork enables you to fully recognize and make good use of others’ abilities, ideas, and opinions; flexibility helps you approach challenges in creative ways instead of feeling overwhelmed when your first attempt fails. In the end, each of these skills makes you a better problem-solver, allowing you to overcome any obstacle that hinders your team’s progress and success. Whatever company or field you plan to delve into, developing a strong set of soft skills early on enables you to stay in tune with the people around you and bring out their strengths as well as yours, showing employers that you have what it takes to accomplish the goals they set out for you. If hard skills are a collection of different instruments playing together, each with different sounds, then soft skills are the microphone that projects the sound.
Whether you are new to the workforce or simply looking to improve your resume, taking some time to reflect on your own soft skills can be extremely beneficial. It is easy to focus on improving upon the hard skills that you are already equipped with, sharpening an already pointed blade, instead of working to develop the more ambiguous “soft skills” that play an understated role in any work environment. But as our interviews have shown, putting in the work to hone these skills provides an enormous payoff. Having respectful conversations with others, learning how to listen and respond to different perspectives, and finding creative solutions to problems are just a few ways to develop and improve upon soft skills.
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