Hard Skills vs Soft skills

Hard Skills

Hard skills are teachable abilities or skill sets that are easy to measure and learned in the classroom, through books or other training materials, or on the job (Deen, 2017).

Example:

§  Banking, engineering, accounting, teaching, manufacturing

§  Proficiency in a foreign language

§  Analysis, research

§  Legal, medical, technical

§  Rules stay the same irrespective of Company or Culture

Soft Skills

Soft skills are fundamentally people's skills or behavior specific skills. soft skills are non-technical, intangible, personality specific skills which determines an individual's strength as a leader, listener and negotiator, or as a conflict negotiator. Soft skills are the characters and capabilities of attitude and behaviour rather than of knowledge or technical aptitude (John, 2015).

Example:

§  attitude, Flexibility, Teamwork, leadership

§  communication, Persuasion

§  Creative and critical thinking, professionalism. 

§  Motivation, Patience

Careers that need hard skills and little soft skills - Brilliant people (like Einstein) who may not easily work well with others but can still be very successful in their career (example: Physicists, Scientists, Analysts)

Careers that need both hard and soft skills – many careers are in this category (example: Accountants, Lawyers, Doctors, Architects, Engineers, Pilots)

Careers that need mostly soft skills and little hard skills (example: sales job is more dependent on ability to read customers, communicate sales pitch, persuasion skills, and skills to close to deal.  

Hard skills can be easily taught to most people with the right training tools. However, it’s widely recognized that soft skills are harder to learn and to train (Cukier et al., 2015). The reason is that over a lifetime work, habits and attitudes become deep-rooted. Developing new soft skills includes changing attitudes, work viewpoint and overcome personal character flaws. Debatably, it takes much more commitment, mindfulness of one’s own flaws and openness to overcome a personal trait than a lack of technical knowledge. In short, Soft skills are more important in most business careers than hard skills (Patacsil and Tablatin, 2017)

Reference

Cukier, W., Hodson, J. and Omar, A. (2015) “Soft skills are hard” a review of the literature. Ryerson University.

Deen, S. (2017) Soft skills need for the 21st century workforce. PhD. Walden University.

John, J. (2015) Study on the impact of the soft skills training programme on the soft skills development of management students. Jaipur:Researchgate.p.20.

Patacsil, F. F. and Tablatin, C. L. (2017) Exploring the importance of soft and hard skills as perceived by it internship student and industry. Journal of Technology and Science Education.