As much as you would think tech is all about the technicality, programming, and architectural specifics that make up the industry, you would be shocked to find that tech is not only that.

Always remember, tech is a people’s business!

How you get the technology to interact with people is the key, and figuring out ways to continuously marry the two (people and technology).

We can never ignore the human element of this industry and our roles when it comes to connecting.

What you’ll find in this industry, under all the jargon and techno hype, is the importance soft skills play in the tech industry.

When we talk about soft skills, we refer to those intangible qualities, traits, and characteristics that are pivotal in one’s engagement with others – whether that’s at work, with friends and family, or life in general.

What are soft skills?

Why are soft skills important?

Why should it even be a thing?

What impact does it have?

Typical examples include:

• Communication (verbal, written, and visual)
• Teamwork (collaboration and cohesion)
• Presentation
• Organisation
• Time Management

Have you ever tried tea with no water? – Doesn’t make sense, right? You can’t have tea without water.

Now, the same applies to soft skills – You cannot effectively navigate through work, and life in general, without sufficient use of soft skills.

How well do you think you’ll do at work if you cannot communicate? – The polite answer is you won’t even last.

How well do you think you’ll cope without knowing how to manage time effectively? – Yeah, just forget it!

Soft skills act as our first layer of abilities before anything technical.

This is because everyone possesses an ability to communicate to some degree; everyone has an ability to collaborate/work with others; everyone has the same 24 hours, yet, how we manage our time differs.

Soft skills have a massive impact on our basic qualities and standards; that’s why if these aren’t exercised the same way as technical aptitude/job-specific skills, then you lack the basics.

Soft skills aren’t meant to be complicated, so should be quite simple to develop.

We just need to make sure we work on these constantly, to brush up on areas where we may require improvements.

Here we share 5 quick wins for you.

When it comes to growing those soft skills, public speaking is like your bread and butter, as the best place to start.

Public speaking helps you build multiple skills simultaneously, i.e. communication, presentation, attention to detail, etc.

Knowing how to communicate is your first step in strengthening your capability in messaging, response, and delivery.

Speaking in front of an audience is a great way to exercise your messaging, for example, how easy is it for someone to understand your messaging?

Public speaking is, commonly, one of the most nerve-racking things to do – not everyone is comfortable doing this activity.

But being in front of a crowd develops another soft skill…

Presentation – Not in terms of appearance but more so sharing information in front of an audience.

Presentation skills are one of, if not, the most critical soft skills as it’s all about presenting information that’s easy to understand.

Having good presentation skills suggests you can engage with different audiences with ease; you’re calm under pressure, and comfortable speaking to a large crowd.

Putting yourself in environments where you have to engage in public speaking is a great way to work on your soft skills.

What also helps is watching TED Talk videos and checking out a few examples.

Compare and contrast different ones; look at how a presenter speaks to an audience and try to read the audience’s response – is the information being received well?

Can you understand what’s being said?

How engaging is the presentation and is it something you would want to listen to more?

These are some basic ways you can observe whether someone has good communication and presentation skills.

Being a good mentor requires you to have solid organisation and time management skills.

As a mentor, you need to show you’re well-organised.

Your mentee depends on your guidance and experience to help them in their development journey.

One of the key ways you exercise those soft skills is through your planning and facilitation – for example, whenever you meet with your mentee, it helps to always have an itinerary.

Knowing what the plan is for the day; to-do tasks and expectations provide clear objectives for the day – but more importantly, this shows you’re organised.

It may not seem significant, but prioritising and managing tasks are critical skills.

If you’re unable to tell your mentee what the plan of action is, it can show your incompetence.

Whereas, if you’re regularly prepped whenever you encounter a situation and have things in place for that specific occasion, then this is a clear indication of an organised individual.

The role of a mentor should be to guide, support, and lead.

The reason why being a mentor is a good way to grow your soft skills is that you need to be good at managing your time.

This can be related to setting up meetings and being readily available for your mentee.

Essentially, as a mentor, you know time is of the essence. A good mentor is responsive and knows how to prioritise.

Participating in team-building activities and working with others is a great way to enhance your teamwork abilities, as well as, communication and other skills.

This is where soft skills are utilised in their greatest form.

Firstly, knowing how to collaborate in a team is important in the world of tech.

Group work, or what is better known as think work, involves the accumulation of different minds coming together to work more efficiently and achieve business goals.

The soft skills you build while working in a team varies widely, but you’ll see the benefit as you develop multiple skill at once.

For example, team building activities often involve brainstorming work and group discussions, which involves:

• Listening to what others have to say
• Understanding different perspectives
• Consolidating a variety of information into one
• Adhering to the needs of each person in the group

All of the above are those soft qualities which one develops as they engage in group activity.

Working with others is the easiest way to improve your soft skills – Why?

Because if you know how to effectively work in a group outside of a work environment, then doing so in a work environment will be easy.

This is why, if you notice, interviews are often broken into multiple stages, where one of the final stages is always assessment centers or a day with the team.

This is to see how well one can work with others in a team.

There’s one thing that all the aforementioned points before this section have in common… the fact that you need to be around people.

The easiest and most efficient way to grow your soft skills is by putting yourself in front of people.

We’ve touched on public speaking, being a mentor, and even participating in team-building activities, all of which are different ways you can be in front of people.

But what if it were much simpler than that – literally! Well, practically, it is.

You can grow your soft skills by attending social conferences – networking events and other activities where you’re surrounded by a group of people.

Conferences are places where you’ll end up doing all the exercises previously discussed., such as team-building, mentoring, etc.

You can make it even easier for yourself by being outdoors more. This might sound simple, but, being outdoors allows us to utilise more of our natural human abilities.

For example, attending a personal development boot camp involving multiple people is a great way to interact and engage with others.

It may not have been possible otherwise to get yourself to a comfortable point where you find it easy to navigate people, but taking part in the boot camp, helped you unlock soft skills that would’ve otherwise been kept dormant forever.

Take a training course, for example, leadership. Leadership training tends to promote a range of soft skills as these are often linked to what is an effective leader.

How can one grow their soft skills in general?

By focusing on activities and tasks that help you utilise communication, teamwork, organisation, and time management.

Oh yeah, leadership incorporates all of them.

To be a solid leader you need to know how to communicate with people.

What message are you trying to portray and how are you delivering this message?

What makes a leader a great leader is someone who people understand and relate to.

The message has to be clear, persuasive, and meet the needs of the people. But a great leader is also organised.

Organisation plays a vital role in the structure and mobilisation of one’s initiative when leading others.

You quickly build upon organisation skills, as a leader, by preparing events and activities for people.

As the main point of contact, you are responsible for the right arrangement of tasks and other things.

Without making this complicated, you being a leader means you organise, communicate, and drive a team toward a common goal.

As far as the goal is concerned, this doesn’t matter— however, the way you achieve this goal is by working together as a group and towards a desired deadline.

There are two things here: working as a group and the desired deadline.

Working as a group means working as a team, which means good teamwork is required.

This is a soft skill you can easily develop through group work and team activities as previously mentioned.

When it comes to a desired deadline, all this means is working towards the deadline of the goal and meeting that timeline.

Can you guess what soft skill you’re triggering here? – You guessed it, it’s time management.

As you can see, you need to be good at managing your time to achieve goals in the appropriate timeframe.

This is why good organisation, communication, teamwork, and time management skills all constitute to being an effective leader.

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