According to Forbes, a major coalition of businesses, policy experts, trade groups, and academics are demonstrating that soft skills — specifically interpersonal skills, the ability to manage and control your emotions, communication skills, leadership, adaptability, and problem solving — are critical. A new study from Boston College, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan found that soft skills training, like communication and problem-solving, boosts productivity and retention by 12 percent and delivers a 250 percent return on investment based on higher productivity and retention.
A recent report by iCIMS Hiring Insights found that 94% of recruiting professionals believe an employee with stronger soft skills has a better chance of being promoted to a leadership position than an employee with more years of experience but weaker soft skills. Failing to show soft skills at a job interview can cost you the job. According to the report, 75% of recruiting professionals have cut an interview short because a candidate didn’t demonstrate the soft skills needed for the position they had applied for.
“Soft skills get little respect but they will make or break your career.” Peggy Klaus
Employers agree that candidates, as well as their current employees, lack soft skills significantly. According to a survey by Adecco Staffing , 44 percent of executives said a lack of soft skills was the biggest proficiency gap they saw in the workforce.
Soft skills are an essential part of finding, attracting, and retaining clients. Highly-developed presentation skills, networking abilities, and etiquette awareness can help you win new clients and gain more work from existing clients. Honing your abilities to resolve conflicts, solve problems, and provide excellent customer service can lead to stronger relationships with colleagues, vendors, and other professional contacts. Ultimately, strong soft skills can help you gain confidence — an invaluable trait in the business world.
By developing strong leadership, teamwork, and communication abilities, you can run projects more smoothly, deliver results that please everyone, and even positively influence your personal life by improving how you interact with others.
What are the key soft skills needed in business today?
Many people are adequate or even exemplary with some skills yet struggle with others. For instance, you may have excellent communication and teamwork abilities but struggle with time management or struggle under pressure. It’s not uncommon to either underestimate the importance of soft skills or overestimate your own proficiency.
The good news is that soft skills can be learnt. STYREX SOLUTIONS SDN BHD specialise in coaching and training in soft skills to help create strong employees, teams, leaders and organisations.
Well-rounded, highly-developed soft skills can be invaluable to business success. While soft skills can at times be more difficult to develop than hard skills they are arguably equally important in running a successful business.
To be successful in business it is important to be viewed by others as credible and authentic. Where there is credibility, it is so much easier to be able to influence others, achieve results, and deliver messages that ‘get through’ to the audience, who will be inclined to want to listen to you and what you have to say. STYREX SOLUTIONS provide a range of corporate training solutions which include a suite of Personal Impact and Effectiveness courses that can provide your employees with training in the soft skills that they need to perform and for your business to succeed.
Here are just a few of the soft skills you can learn with STYREX SOLUTIONS:
1. Communication Skills
In today’s business culture, the ability to communicate with customers and colleagues at all levels is becoming increasingly important to individual success. Not only do you have to be effective at your job, but you also have to be effective at interacting with a wide range of other people.
Communication is the soft skill that binds teams together. Without communication, the team lacks efficiency, harmony and the ability to pull together in a crisis. Encouraging openness at all levels can help identify problems as they arise and lead to faster action.
“Take advantage of every opportunity to practice your communication skills so that when important occasions arise, you will have the gift, the style, the sharpness, the clarity, and the emotions to affect other people.” Jim Rohn
So much energy and time is wasted at work by people trying to clarify ambiguous messages, or unclear instructions, or trying to decipher long and waffling emails.
Additionally, so few people listen with the intent to hear, and this creates many challenges, not only in missing vital information, but also in putting barriers in the way of developing quality relationships.
In the STYREX SOLUTIONS Interpersonal Skills Communication course you will increase self-awareness about the impact your own communication style has on others and will learn techniques to adapt your style to suit your audience.
2. Assertiveness at Work
Assertiveness is a key factor in encouraging straightforward communication and reducing misunderstanding and the danger of unproductive conflict. The assertive person will achieve their own aims whilst, at the same time, taking full account of the feelings of others.
In Assertiveness at Work from STYREX SOLUTIONS Corporate Training, we will help those employees who want to improve their overall communication style, and increase their personal credibility and gravitas, both key attributes in order to be able to successfully influence others.
3. Influencing and Persuading
All day every day each of us have to influence and persuade a myriad of different people to do a variety of different things: transfer to another team, fulfil a new job role for us, complete a piece of work, approach a task in a different way, or maybe buy a product or service. The list is endless. Being viewed as a successful influencer is a critical skill for anyone in management, and is essential for anyone who ever has to sell anything to anyone!
Our Influencing and Persuading training has been designed to help anyone who ever has to influence, understand the psychology of successful influencing and equip them with the tools, techniques and approaches that will significantly increase their ability to persuade and influence anyone, and sell concepts, ideas, and products, both internally and to external clients and stakeholders.
Other courses in STYREX SOLUTIONS’ Personal Impact and Effectiveness suite include:
- Advanced Presentation Skills
- Business Writing
- Facilitating Motivational Meetings
- Giving and Receiving Feedback
- Handling the Media
- Interpersonal Communication
- Managing Upwards
- Presentation Skills
- Public Speaking
- Resilience and Personal Wellbeing
- Mental Health First Aid
Everyone brings differing levels of soft skills and emotional intelligence to the workplace. Just as technical abilities are important in the workforce, soft skill training is also a necessary investment to make, and businesses must recognise the need to do this, particularly for their millennial employees.
