What are Soft Skills?
Soft skills can be thought of as non-technical skills that characterize how you work and connect with others. Your ability to effectively communicate, to adapt to a variety of situations, to problem-solve, etc., can all be considered examples of soft skills. Forbes.com provides further explanation and examples of essential soft skills.
Soft skills are developed and perfected through experience. Many people associate soft skills with personality traits, which leads people to believe that these traits are fixed and simply apart of a person’s identity. However, I firmly believe that experience leads to soft skill growth. Our experiences are opportunites to mold and reconfigure our soft skills.
In thinking about my website for my new consulting business I went back and forth on if I wanted to use Weebly or Goggle Sites in which I am very experienced, or take a risk, get a .com, and build one on my own. I have some experience on WordPress from using it years ago to gamify my classroom, but at that time I had tons of help from a young, smart, techie friend. Brice J basically put it all together and I drank coffee. Though I am OTA and do not have the technical skills needed, my soft skills of problem solving and persistence got a work out. There were many times I wanted to quit, but I muddled through and now I have more experience to keep growing in problem solving, critical thinking, and adaptability.
A thought to puzzle over…
What experiences can we give our students in the classroom to cultivate and grow their soft skills?