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Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Soft Skills and Hard Skills: More About Them

(Refer our High Quality Management Encyclopedia at: http://management-universe.blogspot.com/)

(You will benefit more if you also read all of my previous write-ups on this site).

Hard skills are technical skills. Like writing programs for computers, preparing a balance sheet, working on a particular machine for a particular process in a manufacturing workshop, acting in a television serial or a cinema film, carrying out a surgery etc. You must have proficiency in these skills in order to become a good professional in your chosen fields and to earn decent living.

You can do a still better job of your chosen professions if you also acquire proficiency in those soft skills which are required to perform your jobs better. These soft skills are behavioral in nature. For example, how do you communicate with the people, how good are you in making business presentations, how empathetic you are with the people you come across, can you work as a team member, do you manage your time well and so on. These skills make all the difference.

Mere technical skills allow you certain degree of success. You can achieve higher degree of success if you equip yourself with soft skills too.

Technical skills are obvious and people learning them find it easy to understand and follow the processes of acquiring these skills. However, one wonders as to what is there to learn in soft skills; you are already doing them. Say, communication. You have been speaking and listening from the very young age and so, one may think as to what is there to learn more and how to learn. But if you look around you may find that some people are more effective in speaking than others. Here is the answer. The people who speak more effectively have learnt and practiced to speak effectively. They have followed and implemented certain processes and guidelines for speaking more effectively. It did hot happen to them accidentally or automatically.

Soft skills make a difference in the external and internal personalities. People who acquire soft skills of high order are more sophisticated, more cultured, more reformed and are found to be more successful in every walk of life.

Therefore, in addition to perfecting your hard skills, also try to perfect your soft skills.

(You can download eBook "Competencies and Competency Matrix" from http://nbuu.co/cm)

Read "Management Anecdotes" authored by Shyam Bhatawdekar at: http://management-anecdotes.blogspot.com/

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