What are Soft Skills?
“The soft skills are the hard skills.” - Amy Edmondson
"Beginnings today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster. Your life will never be the same again." - Og Mandino
“No matter what we do, each instant contains infinite choices. What we choose to think, to say or to hear creates what we feel in the present moment, it conditions the quality of our communication and in the end the quality of our everyday life. Beliefs and attitudes are made of thoughts. Negative thoughts can be changed and by doing so we create for ourselves more pleasant inner states and have a different impact on the people around us” - Dorotea Brandin
Soft Skills correlates with some terms of a very close meaning: “Life Skills”, “Emotional Intelligence Quotients”, “Social Skills”, and “Interpersonal Skills”.
Soft skills is a term often associated with a person's Emotional Intelligence Quotient, the cluster of personality traits, social graces, communication, language, personal habits, friendliness, managing people, leadership, etc. that characterize relationships with other people. Soft skills, also known as people skills, complement hard skills to enhance an individual's relationships, job performance and career prospects. It's often said that hard skills will get you an interview but you need soft skills to get – and keep – the job.
Soft skills could be defined as life skills which are behaviours used appropriately and responsibly in the management of personal affairs. They are a set of human skills acquired via teaching or direct experience that are used to handle problems and questions commonly encountered in daily human life.
Soft skills are often called people skills. These include how we talk, connect and behave with others. But these are more than that. These also include the kind of attitude do we possess? Emotional intelligence is a very important part of soft skills. Ability to work and cooperate with others, to achieve our goals, these are all part of soft skills.
These are different from ‘hard skills’, which refer to technical or trade skills or subject matter expertise or knowledge - like – mechanical engineering, operating a machine, performing a surgery, Mathematics any specific knowledge or skill you would need to perform your job.
Soft skills are the intangible, non-technical, personality-specific skills that determine one’s strengths as a leader, facilitator, mediator, and negotiator – Robles.
Soft skills are intangible, but they are utterly expressive. They are not measured but felt - Manzar et al.
According to Wikipedia, soft skills are a combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, character traits, attitudes, career attribute, social intelligence and emotional intelligence quotients among others that enable people to navigate their environment, work well with others, perform well, and achieve their goals with complementing hard skills
The Collins English Dictionary defines the term "soft skills" as "desirable qualities for certain forms of employment that do not depend on acquired knowledge: they include common sense, the ability to deal with people, and a positive flexible attitude."
As per Engelberg (2015), soft skills can also be explained in terms of personal skills and social skills. Personal Skills mainly correspond to cognitive Skills, such as knowledge and thinking skills while social kills refer to relationships with other people. To just mention some, a knowledge skill is the capability of elaborating information and a thinking skill is the ability of exercising critical judgment. Examples of personal skills are the capacity and desire to continue to learn and the ability to plan and achieve goals. Main Social Skills can be identified in communication, listening capability, negotiation, networking, problem solving, decision making and assertiveness.
In brief, we could say that soft skills are combination of personal skills and social skills, intangible, non-technical, expressive, and difficult to measure and can only be felt.
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