www.lifehack.org: Throughout your career, you will be judged on your hard skills. But you will advance faster and further based on your soft skills. Having technical skills that qualify you to do the work will only take you so far. Soft skills bolster your career by allowing you to effectively interact with others in your work setting.
12 comments:
This was a very interesting article to read because it present already known information in a somewhat more effective way.
The topic of hard and soft skills is a constant thing. Everyone talks about it and rightfully so, given there importance in our professional and personal life. But what this article shed light on on is what I believe so important to know.
It talks about the everlasting importance of soft skills, because they are what will stay with us for the longest time because they are part of a personality. Whereas hard skills have a timer on them: our ability to carry out these skills depends on our adaptive knowledge of the skill set, our age, our physical strength and other such factors. And this article rightfully stress on at the importance of developing our soft skills to the point where our hard skills can be looked at and accepted for being adaptive in nature and dependent on what we can deliver at the time.
I love this article. I think that more people need to have more knowledge on the impact soft-skills have on their work and functionality in a group setting. I think that this article addresses some very important soft-skills such as creativity. Creativity is one of the most important skills for someone in a technical theatre world. Whether a person is a designer, which in that case creativity may be considered a hard-skill, even technical directors and managers need creativity in more of a problem solving kind of way. I think that the other soft skills such as time management are so important to our field. In class the other day, we were talking about how theatre people actually know how deadlines work versus every other profession. In theatre, opening night is opening night with very little wiggle room. During the build of a show, time management is half the build process.
I never really thought about hard skills and soft skills much until recently. I guess because it's become such a vital part of me finding my place in the technical direction world. In hindsight, as a scenic designer, I didn't feel as pressured to have exceptional hard skills. (That's not to say that I didn't have them, it just wasn't something that loomed over my head.) Granted, there are things like being able to paint, draw, make models, draft, etc., to help others visualize the designs being created. But if you aren't good at one thing, there are substitutes. For example, if you don't like model making, you can sometimes get away with rendering or making 3D models. Or if you don't like drawing, you could find other ways to communicate ideas. However, there was no hiding when it came to being a scenic designer and having to have decent soft skills. That's where I felt the pressure. You have to be able to collaborate and work with others. You have to be able to articulate. You have to be team player. You have to be able to be persuasive. You have to be able to stand up in a production meeting and own it, while being confident in your design choices. If not, it shows and things can get a little rough. I spent a great deal of time honing these soft skills, but now I have moved into a technical world where it often feels like the hard skills are valued more. The tables have turned for me. I do realize that there needs to be a balance, but from observations, it seems as though people can get away with having good hard skills and not so good soft skills more than they can get away with having good soft skills and not so good hard skills. To a certain extent, I understand why. But at the same time, from where I stand, I feel as though as a technical director, they are both equally as important. You can be the best welder on the floor, but does it matter if people don't want to work with you because you lack those soft skills? You can be a great carpenter but does it matter if you don't know how to manage a crew? You can be a great technical designer but does it matter if you don't know how to receive information from others, communicate and collaborate on that process with others? Who knows...
It’s internship/job application season so I’ve been thinking about hard and soft skills recently. It was interesting to see what the most sought after soft skills were by employers recently - so I looked at those and thought about whether or not I possessed these skills (creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, time management). I know my weakest soft skill is probably time management. This is so in the sense that I am not very consistent, sometimes I get things done super fast while other times it will take me a very long time to get anything done. This all depends on how I’m feeling that day and what else I have to get done. I’ve always felt that I’ve had more prevalent soft skills than hard skills. I don’t know many things other than some computer applications, but I would consider myself to be a creative and friendly person - which is important especially in management because we interact with so many different people.
In theatre, soft skills often seem to be more important than whatever hard skills you bring to the table. You could be the most fantastic designer out there, but if you’re a terrible collaborator no one will want to bring you onto their team. Looking back on my time in high school theatre, I most definitely came out of the program with a whole new host of hard skills that I would not have learned anywhere else, but I think the change that was most prevalent and impactful on me was how theatre shaped my own soft skills. I never liked group projects until I started working on teams and crews in theatre, and I have developed skills to facilitate and lead projects and productions that have been helpful even beyond my work in theatre. But developing soft skills is often a nebulous task- it’s so important to self reflect and also to gauge your progress from your interactions with your peers and leaders.
Soft skills are so underrated. Whenever I work with anyone, I don't find myself considering what they do and do not know how to do, but how they treated me and those around me. Being a good leader and peer is so incredibly important. You can always be explained hard skills pretty easily, but you have to work quite hard to develop your soft skills. Being able to work on a team is, in my opinion, the single most important skill a theatre-maker can posses. You can have as many hard skills as you want, but if you can't work on a team, you'll never be able to create a cohesive show. I've seen almost zero shows fall apart due to a lack of hard skills, but I've seen so many fall apart due to a lack of communication and respect. In my opinion, there's nothing more important to the theatre industry than soft skills.
Every profession in the theatre requires a certain set of soft and hard skills, but some rely more heavily on a certain side. I've always considered stage management as one that requires a high percentage of soft skills. What's tricky about that is they cannot be learned in the classroom as effectively as hard skills. Hearing lectures on collaboration and communication are important, but difficult to envision without actually putting them into practice. I like that this article provides non-classroom tactics for developing stronger soft skills (especially the point on creativity, which does not have to only be something you either have or don't). I had previously only thought that soft skills could only really be improved with experience. While I do stand by the importance of experience, it's not always available as an opportunity. At CMU we primarily experience positions of leadership as upperclassmen, but we must develop the soft skills required to thrive in them beforehand.
This is a really important concept to understand, especially in our industry. In high school, I was part of a constitutional debate team, so I was consistently practicing my “on the spot” public speaking skills. While I am not focused in anything relating to the Constitution now that I am in college, I am still realizing all of the skills that I gained from this experience. I also really think that our curriculum gives us a lot of these soft skills naturally. From major group projects, to talking with workers at Creative Reuse, I think we indirectly gain so many of these skills, which is so important. We are always going to have to interview and speak with people to get work and a lot of the times it seems like you get jobs for just being a good person. If you know what you’re doing in the theatre sense, and able to communicate like an actual human being, I think anyone can go very far.
I found the article’s section on adaptability to be especially important. I think the faculty in drama also emphasizes this a lot. Being able to adapt is one of the most important skills to have no matter what concentration you’re in. For example, during lighting stagecraft, we were taught the basics of how certain lights function because no matter what brand it is, what model it is (although lighting technology rarely changes so I have been told), its core functions will always stick to the basics. After knowing this knowledge, you just need to be able to apply it to understand new knowledge, in other words, adapt. I also found the last section very helpful, about having a balance between hard skills and soft skills. It makes a lot of sense because you need to have the technical knowledge to base off of and then utilize your soft skills. At the same time, you can’t work with others just with hard skills while lacking soft skills.
I really like this article and definitely agree that hard skills and soft skills are both important. I think the ratio of their importance depends on your career - it’s probably more important for a computer programmer to be good at programming than at talking to people, but at the same time they would also need to be finishing their code on time. I think that because theatre is such an inherently collaborative industry, people skills are so important to being able to do our jobs, specifically for stage and production managers who are responsible for communication for the whole production. Not that hard skills don’t matter, because of course they do. But a lot of times there’s an attitude of ‘I can teach you how to do that thing I need you to do as long as you’re willing to learn and a good person to work with’ rather than the other way around, and I actually think that attitude is really beneficial to people just starting out in the industry.
Something that these articles never seem to stress is how soft skills especially can be developed in your personal life. You don’t have to wait for the next big project to come along to work hard at being a leader and learning how to collaborate better. Just learn how to do those things by being a good person in your personal life. Work on communicating more clearly with your partner. Learn how to manage your time so you can show your friends you value them. All you really need to do is learn how to be a good person with successful relationships, and then apply all of those strategies and tools to your work life. You should value your relationships with your coworkers the same way that you value your personal relationships. They should take the same effort in building rapport, communicating effectively, and being open to compromise. If your coworkers think you are a good and genuine person, you shouldn’t have to work as hard at proving that you are a good and genuine leader and coworker.
As many people mentioned above, I believe soft skills are extremely important in the field of art because it is harder to determine what is “better” base on hard skills. There is no right or wrong in art, therefore, we ought to rely on soft skills such as, communication skills, interpersonal skills, and individual creativity and common sense when working with others. However, I often see people relying too much on their soft skills, especially around the art industry, not the core. People who are good at socializing and getting along with people. It is hard to distinguish them from people with real hard skills because they know how to present themselves, which makes them more troublesome. Of course, those are also important life skills, but although the industry has relatively vague valuation basis, that does not mean that one could neglect developing own hard skills. That is, we must keep in mind that a hard skills-soft skills balance is important.
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