There are five types of job skills essential to career success.
- Hard skills – These are trade skills (like programming, accounting, finance, chemistry) that you need to perform your job.
- People skills – There are 20 soft skills (including communication skills, interpersonal skills) you should develop on how to best work and interact with others so you can influence their perception of you, your work and motivate their actions.
- Self management skills – There are eight soft skills (including patience, stress management) you need to manage how you perceive yourself and how you react to adverse situations
- Work Attitude – Establish positive work attitude (such as hard working, loyal, willing to learn) that is typically valued by companies
- Professionalism – Practice the basic etiquette of business in the way you dress, speak, and act
After working 15 years in corporate america with a Stanford bachelors degree and a Wharton MBA, I realized that good schooling could only take me so far.
The secret to succeeding like an executive (VP level and above)
in any corporation is actually mastering soft skills (20 People Skills and 8 Self Management skills). Here is why
- Soft skills are the most difficult to master and will separate you from the mass. Almost anyone can learn basic Professionalism and the necessary Work Attitude that are fundamental to career success.
- As for hard skills, many schools have rigorous programs regarding how to develop specific hard skills. As long as you are smart and can study hard, you can master the hard skills. Soft skills, on the other hand, are not taught well in school and require dedicated effort and practice while working to develop.
- Soft skills is what will get you promoted to executive level (VP and above). If you look at any executives you admire today, I would bet that the reasons they advanced to that level is heavily due to their leadership skills, communication skills, or ability to inspire action and deliver results – all soft skills. You can find many engineers with great hard skills that have had difficulty achieving executive level due to lack of soft skills.
If you want to achieve career success and executive level status in any corporation, then it’s important to develop your soft skills. You can read books and take training; you can learn from your mentors; you can practice at work every day to develop these skills. I can also help. ... read more
