If to cram the answer into one sentence, the top 5 skills employers look for and value most of all are
It’s a good idea to add them to your CV, but one should understand that they require constant pumping even after being hired.
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There are two main types of skills: hard and soft. Hard skills or technical skills are the ones that are obtained by deeply learning some specific field, such as accounting, programming, and management. Soft skills, in their turn, represent how good you are at establishing and maintaining interpersonal relations. Undoubtedly, almost everyone can develop soft skills, but entry-level employees usually focus on hard skills first to impress the employer.
Therefore, they must realize that soft skills are equally crucial to their hard skills. Not only should they include them in their resume, but also do it consciously – if they possess them or require improvement.
However, there is one more (third) type of skill – transferable. These are the ones that can be used independently from the sphere you’re working in now. For instance, management, listening, and critical thinking will come in handy in many different fields. If you work in support and have developed listening skills by dealing with customers’ complaints or requests daily, they will work out if you climb the career ladder and reach any management role. Managers are bound to be good listeners to understand their team, solve conflicts, establish a common language, etc. Such skills also increase employability a lot.
No organization or business has a chance to survive and thrive without a wise leader. Moreover, it’s not a skill everybody can develop in themselves. Leadership skills make a difference when applying for large companies or corporations – there are many opportunities to become a team leader or take any other leading position. What exactly does leadership comprise? Constant self-development, contributing to team development, critical thinking, solving ethical issues, crisis management, and innovation.
This is an integral part of our life – at home, at work, in public places, or in any relationship. Even not mentioning the professional need for this skill, everybody has plenty of other reasons to level it up constantly. And, by the way, it’s not only verbal communication that matters – but there are also visual, written, and non-verbal ones. Therefore, the first step to demonstrating your communication skills is to prepare a decent CV without grammar, lexical, or punctuation mistakes. The second step is to demonstrate your visual, verbal, and non-verbal abilities in the interview by being prepared beforehand. Besides the abovementioned skills, listening, social skills, and a positive attitude also relate to communication.
There is no chance to avoid facing and dealing with problems of different kinds in any workplace. However, depending on your approach to solving them, your life can be either a fun journey with exciting challenges to overcome or an absolute nightmare with a pile of problems. Besides the ability to find practical solutions, problem-solving also requires creativity, research, teamwork, emotional intelligence, and decisiveness.
Such a luxurious ability to focus on your task and complete them timely and correctly. God bless technological progress, but we still have to learn to live with many distractors and not lose concentration. It takes time to develop such skill and turn it into good habits. Focus, project management, and time management go hand in hand with work ethic.
As no business can exist without a leader, it cannot exist without a team. And it isn’t about a group working in the same office. A team is a well-balanced body in which each member is complementary, supportive, and helpful. This is what all teams should strive for. However, some groups experience difficulties; here, one will need the ability to adapt to any environment. And, of course, don’t forget about collaboration, ability to plan, listening, and communication skills – all of them contribute to successful teamwork equally.
It would help if you started working on leadership at university to reach some level by graduation. As we know, practice makes perfect, so consider heading the executive board of a club or becoming a head person of your group. Try to constantly show off, take the initiative, and partake in various university events. Moreover, the Internet contains many materials on this topic – interviews of the most astounding leaders in different business spheres, numerous blogs, and scientific publications in the public domain. After all, you may find a mentor and work on it together. Of course, entry-level positions don’t require an applicant to be a good leader, but the sooner you start leveling them up, the easier it will be to pave the way to a desired leading position.
Have you ever heard of the seven components of communication or the seven C’s? Here they are: clear, concise, coherent, complete, concrete, correct, and courteous. Don’t forget about credibility and creativity, either! As we’ve already mentioned, literacy is the priority when creating your resume and cover letter. You may ask what literacy is. So, the seven C’s of communication are the fundamental blocks that will help you make your CV or cover letter literate. The same story is about verbal communication during the interview.
Accepting that problems will always remain a part of the working process is better. The faster you learn how to deal with them most efficiently, the easier your life will become. We’ll give you some spoilers: the first thing to do is stop panicking and manage your emotional response. When you can think critically again, move forward according to this plan:
It might require some effort, as being organized and constantly concentrated is hard work. Fortunately, employers tend to offer flexible schedules, so why not use all these opportunities to create the most beneficial environment for both parties?
Every team has a leader, creative director, facilitator, coach, and member. To figure out the most effective approach to organizing teamwork in a particular group, a leader has to be in all of these roles to experience what other members participate in regularly. The same works for the members – just try yourself out in each of these roles, and you’ll identify the most comfortable and suitable for developing.
