Soft Skills

What exactly are soft skills? Soft skills are simply just social skills or people skills. Communication has a lot to do with having great soft skills. Soft skills are something that people use to influence other people’s experiences. This is very important if you want to hold client connections for later projects that companies might have. You want to be able to have great people skills, because no one wants to work with someone who is bad at communicating about when projects will be done, or simply how the project is going and what is going on exactly. In the article I found that talks about soft skills, it talks a lot about people having a ton of technical skills, but they are not good at retaining clients which involves having soft skills.

The 4 most important soft skills according to the book are:

1. Listen for what is important to people

This involves feelings, somethings geeks hate. To develop this soft skill is important because the client is going to look back on his or her experience when looking to find someone for their next job, and if they had a terrible experience with you, than expect to not get another phone call. The book tells us to think of an experience when someone got what we were trying to say, and also an experience in which we were not understood. This is a great tool to look at when wanting to be great at this aspect with a client.

2. Describe a rosy future

When trying to get something fixed in a company whether its a terrible program, or simply an upgrade in email, you need to make it pleasing for other people. If you make it appealing to only you, then chances are, no one else will be on board with you.

3. Expose your desire

When dealing with a client you should be upfront about what it is you want. If you do not have wants or desires, then people will get suspicious. If people do not have trust in you then you will not get more business. It makes it easier for people to come to an agreement if people are upfront with what they want.

4. Translate facts into stories

Geeks tend to speak in facts. They are short and to the point, because they feel like describing things in more details like a story is a waste of time. We talked to some geeks at Asynchrony and the question was brought up about speaking in facts rather than stories, and one of them answered the question by saying that at Asynchrony they really try to relate with their customers. They try to get into their personal lives such as family life, and when they work with a client they speak with them every single day with a formal call, and through a chatroom daily. I feel like this helps out a lot, because it allows them to be personal and speak with stories instead of just straight up facts all the time.

I chose this picture because without soft skills, then your hard skills mean nothing. You can be amazing at technical work, but if you are horrible at communicating with clients and with people in general, you will have a hard time maintaining these hard skills.