In today’s business world, you need to have varied & honed professional skills in order to be successful. Just take a quick look at any job advert to get an idea of what I mean–It seems like every company’s looking for a candidate with a variety of technical abilities on top of numerous interpersonal traits. Oftentimes these are just for entry-level opportunities! In such a competitive and demanding business world, knowing what professional skills are, why they matter, and how to develop them are key to your success.
What Are Professional Skills?
While this is somewhat self-explanatory, it’s still worth defining.
→ Professional skills are abilities that help you succeed in the workplace. These can be habits, personality traits, or abilities that positively affect your performance. Furthermore, these skills are not job specific, and can benefit you regardless of industry, position, or working environment.
RELATED: Read about our Professional Skills Development Services
Soft Skills vs. Hard Skills
If you’ve heard of the terms soft skills and hard skills, you might be wondering how they relate to professional skills.
It’s important to recognize that professional skills refer to soft skills (they will be used interchangeably in this post). These are skills that are easily transferred from one job to another, and they describe how we relate to our environment and those around us.
To give you a better idea of the difference, here are a few examples of each.
| Soft Skills (Professional Skills) | Hard Skills |
| Communication | Copywriting |
| Leadership | C++ Programming |
| Negotiation | Data Analysis |
| Critical Thinking | Typing Speed |
| Time Management | Language Proficiency |
Why Are Professional Skills Important?
Taking a look at the table in the previous section, I’d like to pose a question. Between soft skills and hard skills, which do you think are more important for success in the workplace? → While this might come as a surprise, soft skills are more important. Before getting into why, let’s go back to the 1970’s.
The History Of Soft Skills
Somewhat ironically, the idea of soft skills can be traced back to the US Military back in 1972. According to Habitly, Dr. Paul Whitmore, a man tasked with designing and producing courses for Army specific jobs, coined the term for job related skills that involved people and paper but no machinery.
Since then, the term has only gained popularity, with an increasing number of people coming to see it as an invaluable part of workplace performance.
So, What Makes Professional Skills Important?
There are a number of reasons why soft skills are more important than hard skills. Let’s take a look at a few.
- For one, soft skills allow you to work with other people more effectively. This is important because for pretty much all jobs that exist, you’re going to have to interact with other people at some point.
- Another way to highlight the importance of soft skills is to imagine two people working the same job. Let’s say this individual is a programmer. Given that these two have the same abilities as programmers, let’s imagine one is also good at communicating, teamwork, and leading, while the other isn’t. Which programmer would you rather work with?
- Finally, numbers also give evidence as to why professional skills are more important. According to research conducted by Harvard University, the Carnegie Foundation and Stanford Research Center, 85% of job success comes from having well‐developed soft and people skills. Only 15% relies on hard skills!
Why Aren’t Professional Skills Valued?
Despite all the very real and hypothetical reasons backing the importance of soft skills, there still remains an absence of actual value placed on them.
Looking at where company budgets are spent, according to Blinkist, 72% go into hard skills while only 28% is invested in soft skills. Similarly, according to McKinsey, in the US, jobs requiring hard skills pay over 2x more than those requiring soft skills: $79,183 compared to $39,661! So, why is this all the case?
Professional Skills Are Harder To Measure
One reason why soft skills aren’t as highly valued as hard skills is because they’re harder to measure. In a lot of cases, when people have good communication, leadership, or any other kind of soft skill, we tend to accept their having them as a matter of course. How or why they came to be adept in these areas is besides the question.
However, this becomes an issue when you want to train soft skills. As a trainer, it’s difficult to provide an approximation for the financial returns on learning soft skills, as well as concrete evidence on how much better at a given soft skill you can become.
On the other hand, with the hard skill of learning to program, you can approximate both. There are available numbers and you can either program now or you can’t.
Professional Skills Vary Between Individuals
Another reason why professional skills aren’t as highly valued as hard skills is because they vary so much between individuals.
Let’s say you look at two managers in a single organization. Both managers will have their unique way of leading their teams, each with their own set of pros and cons. Now, is this a bad thing? No, but once again, it makes soft skills more complex than hard skills.
Professional Skills Are Harder To Learn
Finally, soft skills are harder to learn. The fact is, even though you can teach someone something like the principles of effective communication, whether they’re actually able to put what they learn into practice in the workplace is an entirely different matter.
Ultimately, implementation is as important as learning but the former is often overlooked. Eventually what happens then is that those soft skills are forgotten about.
Related: Learn about how Change Management can help your business!
How Do You Develop Professional Skills?
Having spoken so much about professional skills, let’s now look at how to develop them.
First off, it’s important to recognize that people develop soft skills through interacting with people. This means that from the time you were a child, you were picking up verbal and non-verbal cues regarding how to be a better individual.
However, once you want to develop a certain soft skill, there are a few things you can do.
- Learning a soft skill is like riding a bike. You need to practice. Practice involves not only participating in workshops but actually implementing what you learned in real-life scenarios. This is where growth happens.
- As for actual workshops, they are helpful because they provide you with a step-by-step model for developing a particular soft skill. By sticking with the model and implementing what you learn, you can begin to see developments in a soft skill over time.
How Can I Help?
With 20 years experience, including impactful roles at Google and Apple, I, Thijs van Loon, am here to help. My suite of services has been meticulously designed to propel your team to new heights.
One area of expertise is in Professional Skills Development, which can cover anything from sales training, team management, and train the trainer.
By leveraging training certifications from Google and Apple, in addition to my certifications in NLP and Psych-K, I offer tailored, practical solutions that deliver immediate results to your business. By working together, I can help you empower the individuals in your company and your business at large, whether in Singapore, Vietnam or other locations in Southeast Asia.