Soft skills proficiency must figure prominently in CVs of women

Here are seven that you may want to focus on with your employees now and into the foreseeable future: Communication; customer service; leadership; decision-making; problem-solving and critical thinking; collaboration and teamwork and emotional intelligence.

In a remarkable new finding, LinkedIn data reveals that women professionals in India were found to have a 36% higher share of soft skills such as team leadership, strategic leadership and collaboration.

As the world of work changes, so do your needs. Many organizations now realize that power skills are just as important as technical skills in the workplace. Learning about the power skills that are in demand and helping employees hone them is the most ideal step, going forward.

Your employees need to know how to do their jobs towards which they ought to possess or acquire the relevant knowledge, education and experience. However, it has been found that many companies have overlooked the crucial power skills aspect. These differ from software literacy, copywriting, or speaking a foreign language. They are the human skills that help employees better interact with others and the work environment.

Power skills may be more critical now than ever before, and helping your employees develop and sharpen them can benefit your organization. According to a 2022 Pearson study, power skills are more desirable than technical skills and will remain so.

Power skills is simply another name for workplace skills or human skills. It's considered a modern rebranding of these skills to prove their importance in the workplace. In the past, organizations focused more on whether a candidate could, for example, operate a computer rather than whether they could communicate well. Still, business leaders discovered in recent years that both soft and technical skills are important for efficiently running their businesses.Technical skills are the skills you can learn through training and education that apply directly to your job.

Human skills have more to do with how you interact with your surroundings and the people in it, and they typically apply for almost any job. These human skills can take more time and practice than technical skills. While you can take a course and learn how to use a particular type of software, you are likely to need some real-world experience on solving problems or making sound decisions. These are skills you develop over time through various experiences.

Examples of human (power) skills include: Creativity; critical thinking; teamwork; empathy; time management; communication; decision-making and leadership.

Examples of technical skills include: Video production; copywriting; project management; foreign languages; graphic design; data entry and Search engine optimization (SEO).

Strong power skills can help an employee's career, but then the organization also benefits when employees possess such skills.

The benefits include: Discovering untapped talent; creating an agile workforce; improving company culture; increasing productivity; improving employee retention; attracting high-quality talent; creating greater customer satisfaction and creating successful managers and leaders.

Although any combination of power skills can help improve your employees' jobs, some are considered critical, particularly in 2024.

Here are seven that you may want to focus on with your employees now and into the foreseeable future: Communication; customer service; leadership; decision-making; problem-solving and critical thinking; collaboration and teamwork and emotional intelligence.

As a positive work-life balance becomes increasingly important for employees worldwide, so does the need for emotional intelligence. This has to do with how a person controls their emotions.

According to Mental Health America, emotional intelligence involves five key areas: Self-awareness; self-regulation; motivation; empathy and social skills.

Mastering emotional intelligence means recognizing that you cannot control how other people act but can control how you react. This can help your employees with various issues, ranging from stress management to working with customers who are angry.

Many organizations have taken steps to help foster and grow their employees' power skills through upskilling programs or creating job-embedded opportunities to develop and refine these skills.

For example, if you want to help your staff to foster teamwork and communication skills, try team-building exercises or group goal-setting activities. You also can assign employees to projects they may be unfamiliar with so they can practice skills like problem-solving and decision-making.

An excellent way for employees to develop their power skills is to take self-guided online courses that allow them to practice and learn on their schedules.

As organizations increasingly recognize the importance of providing resources to further nurture and develop female leaders, women who score highly in these emotional and social intelligence competencies will rise to the top.

Further, as these competencies underpin highly effective performance, men have a great opportunity to learn from women in the workplace on how best to leverage these emotional and social competencies to become more effective leaders.

Through greater emotional intelligence, both men and women are able to boost performance within their organizations, accomplishing their goals through both internal and external stakeholders.