Cultivating Soft Skills with Continuous Learning

If candidates tick all those boxes on a job description but you need to ensure you make the right choice for your organisation, hiring managers look to an individual’s soft skills.  Creativity, curiosity, emotional intelligence, active listening, resilience, a growth mindset – these are the soft skills buzz words you want your employees to have. If you consistently cultivate your employees soft skills your organisation will be more adaptable, diverse and ultimately more profitable.

Continuous Learning is how you can consistently cultivate these all important intangible skills. Employees and employers should both be taking responsibility for this. Employees need to be continually toping up their soft skills and employers need to be encouraging this.  The continuous updating of skills is of paramount importance.  There is a misconception that soft skills training isn’t essential, and that these skills will develop naturally in the workplace, however if employers aren’t actively training employees their skills will stagnate. Change and growth can occur rapidly and employees need to be adaptable to this so no one gets left behind.

Recent Harvard University research found that only 15% of job success comes from technical skills and 85% from soft skills.

What are Soft Skills?

There are skills you have which allow you to do a job, soft skills are everything else. For example, as a web developer you will have the technical skills to create a website, but you may not have the skills to communicate with a client well, or the creativity to ensure you capture the exact essence of your clients brand. Soft skills are intangible skills often known as interpersonal skills that allow employees to thrive at work.  Soft skills are skills which allow you to not just do a job, but to do a job well. Some soft skills will be natural to you, others you will have to work at.

What is Continuous Learning?

Continuous Learning is the learning of knowledge and new skills on an going basis. It is also referred to as constant learning and lifelong learning.  Continuous learning can happen in many forms from taking a course to challenging yourself and pushing yourself out of your comfort zone.  Continuous learning will allow innovation to thrive.  Every business has a purpose or mission, a structure, the requirement to deal with internal and external influences and every business has to embrace change. Innovation in a business context is a way of turning creative ideas into a product, service or process that impacts positively on the profits of the business.  If you prioritise the development of soft skills through continuous learning you will be encouraging innovation.

Soft Skills eLearning

Using e-learning to boost your employees soft skills can be an effective strategy.  e-learning can have significantly lower delivery costs, there is a consistency with the delivery, there is a reduction in training time and learners can revisit the learning as and when they need to.  By providing employees access to e-learning you are offering them the tools to facilitate their own lifelong learning. If you would like to reap the benefits of having a workforce with the soft skills to increase the profitability of your business then take a look at our range of soft skills online training or contact [email protected].

Reference:

http://www.nationalsoftskills.org/the-soft-skills-disconnect/