Learning Soft Employability Skills

July 12, 2016 admin 0 Comments

There is a range of skills that are highly transferrable and sort after by many different businesses, for many different roles. These are generally labelled as ‘soft skills’ or employability skills; they can be immensely beneficial to learn, regardless of what your job is.

These skills can be roughly broken down into just a few different subjects:

  • Communication Skills – This encompasses both how well you’re able to write and speak. Some jobs won’t consider these important, but most higher level jobs or those that have a career development platform will consider these areas when looking at which of their staff they want to develop.
  • Critical Thinking – This is important for businesses as high levels of critical thinking skills describes how effectively you’re able to gather information about a situation and then come up with a reasonable plan of action.
  • Presentation Skills – Whether you’re a part of a team, working directly under others, in a managerial position, or in sales, the ability to engage with others with your ideas is of paramount importance, so of course a potential employer will place a value on you that is closely related to how well your present yourself and your ideas.
  • Leadership – This is closely related to all three of the previous points, and frankly touches on all of them too. It’s also about how you convey yourself; being self-controlled and confident are key parts to being perceived as an effective leader.
  • Numeracy – Basic numeracy comes up in a lot of jobs. It could be conducting a stock take, working out whether you need more office supplies or a long list of other tasks that rely upon you have some basic numeracy.
  • IT Skills – In our increasingly digitalised world, computer or IT skills are becoming an imperative for everybody to learn the basics. Focussing on improving your abilties with software like Microsoft Excel or Outlook is a good place to start, but you can also expand into learning about hardware or even some basic HTML or CSS or Javascript programming.
  • Committed to Personal Development – Employers will generally prefer staff that are committed to improving their skills and qualifications, as it means that they can avoid going through lengthy recruitment processes for more highly skilled staff. You are also generally a known quantity to them, and they to you, so you’ll be able to get stuck into your new responsibilities a lot quicker.