Soooo Soooft. (Soft Skills)
This week the chapter focused on the difference between soft skills. In order to understand what soft skills are, however, you need to know the difference between hard and soft skills. Both are very important in their own way but cover different areas of how we run our lives.
Whats The Difference?
Soft Skills– Soft skills is a term often associated with a person’s “EQ”, the cluster of personality traits, social graces, communication, language, personal habits, interpersonal, managing people, leadership, etc. that characterize relationships with other people.
Hard Skills– Skills which a person can learn and are generally easily quantifiable and measurable. Such skills would include, programming, carpentry, microsoft office, adobe photoshop, etc.
I would say that my top 4 Soft skills would be: Empathy, Relating, Strategic, and Discipline. I couldn’t really chose which one would be more important if I had to chose between my soft and hard skills because I feel they both play very important roles. Soft skills are great when working with others because they help you to play well with others. Things like having empathy towards one of your friends, or convincing someone to buy a product. Soft skills are handy in many different ways. Hard skills are great for technical work especially when you need to work through tasks. This is also very important because if you don’t have the right skill for a job or task, no amount of soft skill will save you. Hard skills help you to be well prepared for completing work in the most efficient and correct way possible. It is good to have a good mixture of both Hard and Soft skills.
Some Facts about Hard vs Soft Skills
It is never good to depend wholly on either your soft or hard skills because you should be well adjusted to both. While you may charm yourself into a job, if you do not have the right skills for it, then you will not be there very long. I feel that the most important thing that you should know is that it is extremely important to be a team player (soft skill). You will have to work with other people your whole life, so shouldn’t you try to get better at it? If your employer sees that you don’t work well with others then you will be very limited in the type of work you get, that is if you aren’t fired by then. Always strive to improve your skills, and opportunities will open up to you.
Larger version of Infographic
Asynchrony
I loved our field trip to Asynchrony! Ideally when I my Game Developing career is bigger I would want my company to run like that. I loved the type of leadership and management they implemented, and the atmosphere. Walking in and looking at everyone I got the vibe that it was okay to be yourself, which is what I want for my business I start. One thing I noticed is that even though there was a lot of geeks their soft skills didn’t seem to bad. They had the right balance between hard and soft skills (Besides a few exceptions I saw). I would love to work at a place like that, I just wish it had more diversity, but I guess I can’t really expect much being a female in a male dominated field.
I will leave you off with this. While I was looking for good examples of what soft skills are I found this video on YouTube. I would recommend watching it as it isn’t that long (almost 3 min. long). They do a good job at explaining soft skills in relation to what they are looking for in the workplace. Enjoy and I hope you found this informative!