Skills –Understanding Redefined


11 Sep 2020

This post is just an inner perspective of my own observation 

    The regular way of understanding Skills lost its meaning today. Earlier we seen industry witnessed a piece meal personalities with inadequate skills. Many a times I have seen people use the term “soft skills” to describe characteristics that can’t be directly attributed to certifiable or measurable. Like many others am pretty damn tired of referring to these as “Soft skills”. 

     As one of the columnist rightly quoted “Many employers actively seek out of these attributes in prospective employees, making them near requirements for success in the workforce. If something is near requirement, why is it “soft”? I am not a stuffed animal, and neither are these highly relevant job skills”. 

     Today industry is expecting blended set of skills from its potential employees. So here the time comes to put a full stop for those old, conventional theories of understanding skills like hard skills and Soft skills. Let us stop calling it “Soft skills” and “Hard Skills”. It’s time to make it more specific and more expressive of it actually mean. We should create more transparency in the way we human beings express our abilities and the way potential job givers describe jobs. 

Let us find some alternatives to “Soft Skills” and “Hard Skills” 

Soft Skills

Hard Skills

Being more specific we can name soft skills with the below list:

          Cognitive

·         Emotional    

·         Human

·         Interpersonal

·         Life-Learned

·         Psychological

·         Personal

·         Rational

·         Social

·         Subjective

For “hard”

        ·         Academic

        ·         Book Learned

        ·         Certifiable

        ·         Computational

        ·         Learned

        ·         Mechanical

        ·         Professional

        ·         Quantitative

        ·         Specialized

        ·         Technical

 


    In the present Covid times learning ways shifted from Conventional to virtual to Blended. The same is happening with skills also. Skills changing from its generic sense to Blended types, few of potential parings could be:

  • ·         Academic & Experiential skills
  • ·         Social & mechanical skills
  • ·         Subjective & Quantifiable skills
  • ·         Human & Robotic Skills
  • ·         Personal & Professional skills
  • ·         Cognitive & Technical skills
  • ·         Interpersonal & Scientific skills

    When describing yourself using generic set of skills includes both genetic and acquired rather I would suggest you to pick blended skills which elevate yourself and your abilities better. So pickup your new ways of expressing your skills those really impress the job giver and also presents you as a distinct Brand.

    Good Luck and May your hardworking bless you.

Thalari SanjeevKumar

            M.B.A, PhD; M.Sc (Psy); PGDCA; UGC NET; AP SET; CST; TTT; e-TTT

Consultant in Learning – Skills Training – Development - Coaching



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Thalari Sanjeevkumar

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