— Featured Publication from Softest Team (LinkedIn) —
IT professionals often fail to recognise the significance of soft skills in their pursuit of only acquiring expertise in their core skills. The unending increasing intervention of artificial intelligence and automation is cascading dependency upon soft skills.
With the booming enhancement of the digital era, soft skills are becoming a predominant component for the career progression of software professionals. Soft skills are a combination of personal mannerism and interpersonal skills that reflects how well a person can interact with the internal and external team members relating to empathy, people analytics, critical thinking, brainstorming, and get over conflicts.
IT professionals with a blend of proven soft skills and strong core competencies are in a better position to lead. IT Professionals with better soft skills are more likely to choose for succession planning and promotion brackets than the professionals having years and years of expertise in the core field but unaware of the application of soft skills. Employees are more emphasising soft skills with rest respect to the vigorously changing external environment and evolving new adaptability at the workplace.
Here are a few examples of soft skills that contribute to success
1. Communication Skills
Strong communication skills such as writing skills and oral presentation , are the key elements of success in IT industries. Precise writing skills such as creating a user manual for a new program, QA assistance jobs are included in the job role. IT professionals also present the proposal to the new clients, knowledge transfer to the team for special projects. Oral communication plays a very important role in delegation of work, relationship building, and conflict management.
2. Interpersonal Skills
Prowess in a soft skill such as representing the ideas, retaining people, empathy, team building, collaboration, communication with colleagues plays a vital role in every stage of professional growth. There is no doubt that core IT skills are vital for completing any task but soft skill plays a significant role to make the work done.
Due to COVID-19 a lot of technological transformations and digital transformations are happening such as team meetings are now happening on zoom call, Google meeting, etc. IT industries evidence of escalating demand for soft skills such as team management and consistent engagement of professionals for better resultant.
3. Persuasion and influencing skill
In the professional career, the role of IT professionals has also included projecting the ideas and exposing the clients to a variety of alternatives related to the project vital. An uninterrupted process demonstration and delivery of the project will keep the potential customer engaged and will influence the new clients to choose your service over other firms. The ability to convince and keep customers delightful plays a vital role in an organisation’s success.
4. Collaboration
Collaboration is one of the most important skills for all the IT profession as most of the time they need to work with a team. It takes the whole team effort to complete a single project. Collaboration skill helps all the team members to share their ideas and work towards completion of a common goal by enhancing the capacity to learn continuously and grow beyond their comfort zone.
You May Be Interested In: Team Collaboration Tools For Remote Employees
5. Flexibility and Adaptability
In this dynamic environment, every organisation desires to have employees who are more open to a new environment than those who display resistance towards change. Any employer will be more inclined toward those, who are ready to gear up and can lead towards change.
It has been evidenced that most of the time team leaders used to assign a unique featured project to nimble professionals to get better quality of work.
6. Emotional Intelligence
Most of the time, IT professionals have bad rapport when it comes to emotional awareness due to high work pressure. It creates more aloof rather than empathically environment. High emotional intelligence can be a touchwood for team management and client handling.
Emotional intelligence helps the IT professionals to manage the intensity of emotions and become more resilient Emotional intelligence. It ultimately results in stress management and better decision making.
7. Conflict Management
Conflict is fatal in every stage of a person’s professional life. Irrespective of the position held by any IT professional business demand brainstorming, conflict resolution, decision making, and presentation skills to tranquil resolution.
It is important to resolve the interpersonal conflict, relationship conflict, conflict of interest at workplace by properly addressing the issue as soon as possible. Soft skill holds high regard for the team management purpose.
Also Read: In Demand Skills for FinTech Industry in 2020
8. Coaching and Mentoring
Automation and Artificial intelligence intervention would upshot the exigency of soft skills as the core competencies will be performed by robots. This will automatically upswing the demand for soft skills such as engaging the automation workers, demonstrating the work, mentoring, and coaching.
AI intervention will increase the demand for coaching and mentoring for all the IT employees to get acquainted with the automation process and for the smooth running of the organisation.
9. Time management
Several times IT professionals have been witnessed to finish the project so closed to deadlines. Setting up the right course of action can reduce the pressure of closing the project at the end moment such as prioritising the goals, tracking the progress, routine analysis, calendar management.
For example, time management skills are crucial throughout the product development cycle until delivering the product to clients.
10. Work ethics
Every organisation follows certain work ethics which are irrespective of the position hold by a person such as punctuality, meeting deadlines, positive responses toward work, not to breach any disciplinary policy, not to practice in any intoxication at the workplace, etc.
An IT employee delivering all the work before the deadline but recorded continuous late punching would not be entertained by the department and management team.
Hence, Soft skills are also important for IT professionals to perform the task efficiently and effectively along with core skills. Both core skills and soft skills play a vital role for IT professionals throughout their career. While core skills help them to understand, execute the idea, soft skills help them to demonstrate, manage, and deliver the work on time.