Soft skills are in demand. According to LinkedIn’s 2018 U.S. Emerging Jobs Report, oral communication (a key soft or human skill) “remains the skill group with the biggest shortage in nearly every city across the country”.
Yikes.
Google set out to discover “what makes a great manager?” (after initially questioning if managers were necessary at all) and guess what they uncovered? That great managers are necessary – and not unnecessary overhead. Great manager have soft skills in abundance. They are good coaches. They empower teams. They create an inclusive team environment. They listen and share information. They collaborate. Great manager are more than technically proficient, they are profoundly human.
Human skills are at risk of extinction right at the economic moment when we need them more than ever before. As predictable, routine tasks are being gobbled up by AI, the other stuff, the messy, complicated, unpredictable needs to be done by humans (if there are any of us out there).
Even the World Economic Forum has jumped onto the soft skills bandwagon. In their Future of Jobs report, WEF highlighted three critical (soft) skill sets: critical thinking, emotional intelligence and creativity.
To boost your career (and it appears, to future-proof your long-term employment prospects) flex those soft skills! A place to start (assuming you have soft skills you’ve been downplaying or brushing off the value of), is by reviewing how your describe tasks, projects, assignments etc. in your online profile (including volunteer roles) and where possible, find ways to include these not so soft, and highly sought after skills:
- presenting
- communicating
- team building
- supervising
- managing
- strategic planning
- improving business processes
- organizing
- multi-tasking
- time management
- leading
- analyzing
- forecasting
- listening
- collaborating
Want more of my LinkedIn tips (’cause know I have them)? Check out this Networking Q&A. Unsure who to connect with on LinkedIn? Use this flowchart. If you’re proactively hunting for a new job but don’t want to stalk hiring managers on the internet, read this.
