Soft Skills by Azam Jamil
Description
Training your workforce to fill skills gaps is more cost effective than trying to hire specialized employees for each new demand. Executives and L&D leaders can agree on this point—but that doesn’t mean they’re always on the same page.
Our research has found that L&D departments are often more focused on immediate needs than executives would like. Rather than training for today’s demands, executives want more focus on identifying trending skills that will create gaps down the road.
Getting employees up to speed with technical skills is important, but adaptability is the key to success in professional development programs. Today’s important hard skills could be automated tomorrow, which highlights the importance of soft skills.
The best professional development programs will offer the right balance of technical and soft skills training in a way that fits easily into the busy schedules of employees.
5 Key Traits to Target with Soft Skills Training
When hard skills are the primary focus, it’s easy to quantify abilities and match them to a specific role in an organization. We’re getting better at quantifying soft skills but measuring ROI can be a challenge. Qualitative feedback is a good start. However, we should really be paying attention to how soft skills training correlates with team metrics and employee retention.
The following 5 soft skills don’t just increase the performance of individual employees. They boost team and company-wide performance as well.
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Communication: Written and verbal communication skills are largely responsible for how co-workers perceive an individual’s capabilities and contributions to the organization. When an employee can communicate effectively, it makes them come across as more productive while also making it easier to build relationships and collaborate across the organization.
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Adaptability/Flexibility: Because market demands change so rapidly, employees can’t grow complacent with their existing skillsets. Recognizing the importance of soft skills means remaining flexible, pivoting and learning as roles transform to keep companies ahead of their competition.
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Critical Thinking: Especially in the age of big data, businesses need to know that employees can put an abundance of information to good use. Data doesn’t help the business much if no one can pull valuable insights from it. Employees that bring unique perspectives and ideas to an organization will be highly valued regardless of changes in necessary hard skills.
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Time Management: The lines between work and life are blurring and employees have more distractions than ever preventing engagement on the job. Employees that excel at time management can provide value to an organization by remaining productive and finding ways to work on new ideas that will propel the company forward.
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Conflict Resolution: Even in the best work environments, conflicts emerge every day. That’s what happens when people work together (whether they are good collaborators or not). Valuable employees have strong conflict resolution skills, finding ways to promote teamwork no matter what situation comes up.
These are just 5 examples of valuable soft skills that can lead to increased team performance and employee retention. Notice, though, that these traits (and other intangibles like them) are often assumed to be innate. People think they’re either born as strong communicators or they’re not. They see other good critical thinkers or problem solvers and think they’re more suited for other work.
Soft skills training can get employees to change this professional development mindset. Even when an individual isn’t a natural at some soft skill, it’s possible to train those.
Lessons
- 7 Lessons
- 01 hours 56 mins 55 secs
About instructor
Reviews
This has been one of the best courses on soft Skills. Skills that are practical to be implemented.
This was a very helpful course tbh!
"Sir Azam Jamil has orchestrated an exceptionally impactful course on Soft Skills. His teaching methodology is truly distinctive, blending insightful content with practical applications. The course has enabled me to enhance my interpersonal abilities, communication finesse, and overall demeanor. Sir. Jamil's expertise and dedication shine through, making this learning experience truly invaluable.
Must have course for everyday life. Recommended