Hard vs. Soft Skills

If you want to climb the corporate ladder to the top, you’ll need to develop both hard (technical) and soft (management) skills.

There are many more people with hard skills than there are management and executive positions. To winnow down the list of candidates, human resources professionals quickly put people with the necessary technical skills into one pile, then begin deciding who to interview based on their people-management skills.

To get that management job or make it to the C-suite before your peers, you’ll need at least some of the following soft skills:

  • Project management
  • Time management
  • Leadership
  • Team building
  • Interpersonal communications
  • Writing (memos, emails, proposals, reports, letters)
  • Mentoring
  • Public speaking/presenting
  • Goal setting
  • Budgeting

As you begin researching what it takes to land specific positions and begin conducting informational interviews with people who hold those jobs, pay attention to the soft skills needed in management positions and start working on developing them.

Read Steve’s article for KnewMoney.com, What are Soft Business Skills and How Can you Develop Them? to jumpstart your next move into management.

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