Job applicants, in their résumé, often focus on the courses they have taken and the degrees/diplomas received. Employers, on the other hand, see formal education as the minimum qualification and, instead, look for soft skills and the ability to think critically before hiring a candidate.
They try to judge this through tests, interviews and group discussions. A combination of domain knowledge or technical skills and soft skills can get you multiple job offers and higher starting salaries.
For instance, if you intend to follow a career in marketing, your ability to make small talk and crack jokes with a customer may go a long way in the success of negotiating a sale, more than the product itself!
So, what are these skills? How do you acquire them? If you know the answer to the first question, you can deal with the second. Unfortunately there are few programmes that teach these skills as part of the main courses. You may come across short, intensive workshops that claim to teach them, but these skills are often not the kind that you can learn in a weekend workshop. You need to work on them over a period of time.
Soft skills
These are primarily skills required for effective communication, including oral, written, and non-verbal communication skills, the ability to make formal presentations, problem solving skills, punctuality, adaptability, social savvy, taking initiative, and the ability to get along with co-workers.
Many business courses require students to work in teams on a term paper or a library-based research project. These are excellent ways to build soft skills. Being a leader of a team helps build skills such as bringing the activity to a conclusion, coordinating across team members, motivating the slackers to contribute, and preparing the presentation. Students often mistake the need to remain friends (peer associations) for why they could not be effective as a team. Thus, by clarifying to your peers the need to keep a personal relationship separate from the need to complete a task successfully becomes a valuable.
Communication skills can be improved by asking for feedback and working on suggestions received.
Critical thinking skills
This is often used synonymously with analytical skills and they broadly overlap. You would rarely find a course in a business programme that primarily focuses on critical thinking skills, yet the term would figure among the learning objectives of many courses. This is because critical thinking is not separate from content knowledge. You can be effective at critical thinking only when you have good domain knowledge.
Thus, students are expected to pick up these skills as they learn the content and undertake various assignments. So, what are these skills? Professor Willingham, a researcher in cognition, identifies some of these as:
- Ability to see both sides of an issue.
- Being open to new information that would challenge or disconfirm one’s views and ideas.
- Reasoning dispassionately.
- Seeing the evidence before being convinced by an opinion.
- Coming to a conclusion based on facts.
So, the next time you write your term paper or research project, keep these in mind and work on them so they become second nature.
(The writer is a professor at Suffolk University, Boston.)