As soft skills are less about your qualifications and more personality-driven, it is important to consider what your soft skills are and how you might show evidence of them in an interview.
What are skills?
Skill is your ability and confidence to accomplish a task.
Also according to Wikipedia, skills can be defined as the ability to carry out a task with predetermined results often within a given amount of time, energy, or both.
Skills can be categorized into two:
1. Soft skills
2. Core skills also known as hard skills
What is the difference between the two?
Soft skills are influenced by your personality. These are often the words that describe who you are as a person. To be good at soft skills usually takes Emotional Intelligence.
Things that impact our soft skills are:
a) How we were raised
b) How we were trained.
Examples of soft skills are creativity, team work, problem solving skills, People skills like communication, leadership skills, management skills, stress management skills just to name a few.
As soft skills are less about your qualifications and more personality-driven, it is important to consider what your soft skills are and how you might show evidence of them in an interview. This is particularly true of entry level positions like internships, where transferable skills and potential often predominate professional experience. Being able to demonstrate your soft skills compare to demonstrating great potential to succeed and progress in the career of your choice.
Core skills also referred to as hard skills are the knowledge and ability to accomplish a process related to your job. They are usually tangible, measurable and industry specific jargon. They can be learnt in school and developed as you gain more technical experience in your career.
There is usually a designated level of competency and a path as to how to excel with each hard skill. For example, in brand marketing, Brand management would be a core skill. You can persue basic marketing and then advanced in brand marketing courses. You can then work to get experience and take an exam and be certified by CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing)
As both core skills and soft skills are what recruiters look for in a candidate, it is important therefore to learn how to develop your soft skills as you gain experience in your career journey and advance your hard skills.
Fuzu has also made it easy for you to get to know which of your skills is core or soft based on your industry specific career and this is by allowing you to create a profile where you get a choice of skills given to you.
Therefore it is recommended that you specify more of your core skills on your profile but also be ready to demonstrate your soft skills in case you are called for an interview.
