How to develop soft skills and stand out in the market

If you want to get the market's attention, developing soft skills is essential. Check now how to ensure your professional evolution!

If you still think that to attract attention in the job market, you just need to study everything you can about your area of ​​expertise and have a well-stuffed technical curriculum, the time has come to expand that vision.

It is undeniable that technical skills (or hard skills) are essential for professionals to perform their day-to-day functions well, solve problems in their work and show that they can handle the job, but that is only half the way.

In addition to demonstrating high technical competence, those who want to stand out among other professionals also need to develop soft skills – which are more subjective capabilities, but just as important as technical knowledge.

What are soft skills?

While hard skills are technical skills that are more easily measurable in tests and tests, such as mastery of a tool or proficiency in a language, soft skills are more subjective.

Soft skills are related to people's behavior and personality, being traits that we usually identify when we say that such a person is organized, flexible or communicative, for example.

Due to this subjectivity, developing soft skills involves a less defined process than the development of hard skills.

On the bright side, this doesn't mean you can't develop your soft skills. After all, they are traits and skills that can, and should, be worked on like any other, just using a slightly different approach.

How can you develop soft skills?

The first step to start developing soft skills is to identify your current situation and the main points for improvement, and the subjectivity of soft skills makes this first step a little more complex.

When we talk about hard skills, it's fairly easy to self-assess your skills and understand where you need to improve, but when we talk about soft skills, it's important to involve other people to help with this understanding – and that means creating a culture of feedback.

Using language skills again as an example of a hard skill, you can easily self-declare whether or not you know how to speak English in general, for example. But what about your empathy skill? You may have a perception of yourself that is different from that of the people you live with, and listening to these different feedbacks is important for a more complete understanding of the real situation.

Always try to listen to the opinions and perceptions of those who work or interact with you about your soft skills, and use this information to build a more comprehensive understanding of yourself and know how to improve.

Keeps this culture of feedback happening constantly, so that people can also contribute ideas on how to improve their soft skills and you can identify their evolution over time.

The most important soft skills

While hard skills tend to have their importance closely linked to the type of work you want to do, soft skills are relevant regardless of the area of ​​professional activity, once again showing their importance for a successful career.

After creating your feedback culture you will be able to identify which points deserve more attention initially and thus prioritize the development of your own skills, but one report from the World Economic Forum on the future of work can also be a good starting point to guide your efforts.

In the study called Future Of Jobs published in 2020, the world economic forum highlights the following skills as some of those that will have the most increase in demand until 2025:

• self-management

• work with people

• Problem-solving

• Critical thinking and analysis

• Use and development of technologies

Try to talk to co-workers or managers and other superiors to identify your development needs in these and other soft skills and use this feedback to prioritize what you should focus on at any given moment.

Understanding which areas you most need to invest time and effort to develop soft skills are essential practices, and not just for you to be able to stand out in selection processes or earn promotions at work – this growth also helps to increase your own sense of professional accomplishment.

It is possible that you already have some mastery over some of the most relevant soft skills for your professional career, but dedicating yourself to this journey of self-knowledge will take you to a level beyond skill.