A Comprehensive Guide to Soft Skills Training
A Comprehensive Guide to Soft Skills Training
Soft skills training empowers employees at every level to grow and succeed professionally. For instance, effective collaboration, with mangers, coworkers, customers, and vendors, sometimes requires additional training and support. Maybe an employee needs to learn to be more assertive and say "no" and be firm and direct. Perhaps, a new manager needs to have a difficult conversation with an underperforming team member. Or an entry-level employee is asked to give a presentation to a large group for the first time. All of these employees will benefit from soft skills training.
Our course library includes training that covers all of these scenarios like assertive communication, having concerned conversations, and presentation skills. Other topics include collaboration, decision making, conflict management, resilience, emotional intelligence, time management, and many more.
Developing Strong Soft Skills
How a team operates as a unit is often more important than the individual talent levels of the team members.
If the only determining factors for success were hard skills and credentials, then building an effective team would be easy. Managers wouldn’t have to consider their team members’ personalities, attitudes, or their ability to collaborate with one another when putting a team together. However, coworkers don’t always communicate effectively with each other or perform to the best of their abilities.
And this is where developing strong soft skills come into play!
Professional soft skills, like communication, collaboration, and adaptability are difficult to measure. Yet having a strong set of soft skills can help any employee achieve career success – reaching business goals, and enjoying the process along the way. Since employees start with different abilities, businesses can offer soft skills training resources that can improve how employees approach their jobs and collaborate with each other.
In this guide, we’ll explain everything there is to know about soft skills including:
- What soft skills are
- How they differ from hard skills
- What businesses can do to promote soft skills
- How businesses will benefit from implementing effective soft skills training
Let’s get started!
What Are Soft Skills?
Soft skills are the personal, social, and communication abilities that reflect how people interact, collaborate, and perform in the workplace and how well they’re able to identify and address problems.
Simple enough, right?
In fact, soft skills are difficult to define, measure, and organize because, as their name suggests, they’re not hard or tangible and many are related to each other. Take a look at the list of soft skills on the left and see if you can think of a way to measure these commonly desired soft skills.
While the list above serves as a good overview, there is no definitive list of soft skills, and they tend to overlap with each other. But the one constant at the heart of soft skills training is communication. It’s easy to take for granted that professionals understand how to communicate with each other effectively. But if you’ve ever daydreamed during a coworker’s PowerPoint presentation or misinterpreted the tone of an email, then you know this isn’t the case.
Effective communication involves more than just responding to messages or giving presentations. It calls for active listening, high levels of comprehension, and reading social cues and body language. Soft skills highlight the difference between listening to what someone has to say, as opposed to merely hearing them speak; the difference between making a brief, well-thought-out statement and launching into a rambling monologue.
Professionals use soft skills every day, most of the time without consciously thinking about them. When an employee puts their phone away so that they can focus on what their coworker is saying, they’re actively listening. When someone owns their mistake, they are demonstrating accountability. When you make your “to-do” list each day, you are planning and prioritizing. These skills don’t always come naturally but they can be taught.
No one is completely devoid of soft skills and no one is perfectly adept at using soft skills either. Everyone has room to improve.
Soft Skills vs. Hard Skills
Achieving success in any field depends on mastering both soft and hard skills. Hard skills are measurable as they are clear, concrete abilities. Either someone can write JavaScript code or they can't; either they can balance an account properly or they can't. These hard skills help people get their foot in the door because they let employers know a person has the required abilities to perform a job on a base level.
Where hard skills end, soft skills begin.
While there are thousands of professionals with the same education and intelligence level in the workforce, no two people have the exact same impact at their job. In fact, studies indicate that soft skills account for roughly 85% of a person’s success over the course of their career. And employers rightly value employees with soft skills – nearly 50% of recruiters rate a candidate’s listening skills as a high priority.
Some may believe that hard skills are the only “teachable” skills, but this just isn’t true. It is possible to train and hone soft skills, and professionals can take courses on leadership, for example, just as they would for computer programming. Leadership, like any other soft skill, is not a genetic trait or a birthright. Having the ability to lead can be mastered through training, hard work and focus.
"Leaders are made rather than born" - Warren Bennis, leadership studies pioneer
Soft Skills Training Best Practices
It’s true that certain individuals may have a propensity to excel at activities like diffusing conflict or public speaking. Yet, even if you’re terrified of public speaking now, as many of us are, you can become a better public speaker through soft skills training and practice. Plus, people with strong soft skills can bolster them further through training.
The problem is that companies don’t always have the tools to facilitate that kind of growth. A few common problems business leaders encounter when implementing soft skills training include:
- Lack of relevant educational content
- Limited access to capable instructors
- Failure to assess soft skills needs
- Top-heavy educational investment
- Insufficient time to implement training
- No training reinforcement
Since soft skills relate to both personal growth and business progress, they’re essential to a company’s success on a granular and macro level.
Optimum workplace productivity depends on all employees possessing useful soft skills and complementing each other accordingly.
Think about the composition of any successful team for reference. A speedy shortstop has talents that a hard-slugging first baseman lacks, and vice-versa. Or Steve Jobs visionary leadership and the innovative technical genius of Steve Wozniak, whose complementary strengths created a dynamic foundation for Apple's growth. However, their differences aren’t liabilities, they’re advantages because they worked together well; they had chemistry. Good chemistry is the result of soft skills like empathy, active listening, and collaboration.
To improve professional productivity, you can improve your employee’s soft skills with training!
Whether you have an existing soft skills training program you want to improve, or you’re ready to bring a new focus on soft skills at your company, these steps can work to boost your team’s soft skills:
Hire Employees with a Growth-Mindset
In your hiring process, look for potential candidates who display an eagerness and willingness to learn. Since it’s very difficult to teach someone a skill they don’t want to learn, you can get a head-start by simply hiring candidates who already have a growth-mindset and who are life-long learners.
And you won’t be alone in this effort! During the hiring process at Google, attributes they look for is "willingness to learn”, "eagerness to grow" and "adaptability".
Source Engaging Content
When you’re evaluating learning material, look for training that not only keeps learners engaged with meaningful content but also addresses skill gaps while accommodating diverse learning preferences.
- Thoughtful visuals and creative graphics
- Conversational instructors who are relatable to the learners
- Consistent quality of each course, student materials, and exams
- Fresh and updated content for every soft skill training topic
You want to be sure your learners aren’t turned off or uninspired by the lack of fresh and relevant content!
Include a Wide Range of Relevant Topics
Diverse, rich training content is an asset for any forward-thinking business. The more relevant content a business can offer its team members, the more opportunities employees have to grow and learn. For example, leadership training could include teaching each of the DISC styles, succession planning, and feedback strategies.
Additionally, there can be two different sides to the same topic. Managers need to apply soft skills in a different manner than employees. There are differences when working with Millennials vs. Generation Z and training can address those differences.
Additional Best Practices
Assess Training Needs
Soft skills are frequently categorized together, but the reality is that they can refer to very different abilities. An employee may have certain well-developed traits like the ability and willingness to collaborate, but they may be lacking in other soft skills like organization and time management.
For example, a business can assess a need for more efficient project management by reviewing the number of initiatives that launched on time and on budget. For the initiatives that were late or over budget, the team members associated with the project may need assertiveness training to drive a timeline or negotiation training to secure better pricing.
Businesses may also determine their employees’ skills gaps and strengths through formal assessments. These formal assessments, unlike personal observations or interviews, are objective, and they can provide concrete, measurable data that managers can reference over a period of time.
The nature of the business and its long-term goals, along with the needs of each individual employee, should influence soft skills training methods and topics. Not all employees will need the same soft skill training depending on their natural abilities and past career experience.
Create a Learning Culture
Did you know you already have a learning culture at your company? Whether you realize it or not, it’s there!
A learning culture is a set of organizational values, processes, and practices centered around education and learning. An effective learning culture is one that encourages employees, and the organization as a whole, to continuously learn and adapt new skills.
While most learning and development (L&D) leaders say they value learning, sometimes they promote a training culture, not a true learning culture.
What’s the difference? In a training culture, performance problems are addressed through mandatory training. Management dictates what courses you can take and when you can take them. In a learning culture, employees are engaged in self-driven learning that will positively impact business outcomes and personal productivity. L&D leaders encourage employees to seek out learning opportunities anytime they desire.
So how do you build a true learning culture? Inundating team members with tons of content isn’t (on its own) going to lead to an effective learning culture. Rather, managers can help foster a true learning environment by:
- Fostering a culture of learning and elevating it to a core value
- Getting full support from leadership and management
- Sharing the benefits of self-directed learning with all employees
- Offering employees learning experiences they desire regardless of their location
- Being consistent in training approach
Keep in mind that the learning culture will differ based on the needs, learning styles, and goals of both the company and its employees. For instance, some businesses have very regimented ideals and principles that they want their employees to embrace, and their learning culture will reflect that. Meanwhile, others encourage a more free-form method for employee learning, and, as a result, the learning culture will be quite different (though not better or worse).
The benefits of building a successful learning culture are numerous! A few include boosted employee morale, improved employee retention rates, and a happier workplace.
Reinforce the Training
Quiz time! Do you know the capital of New Hampshire?
How about the first element on the periodic table? Or who invented the cotton gin?
It’s likely that even if you don’t know the answers to these questions now, you did at one time. (By the way, they are: Concord, hydrogen, and Eli Whitney.)
That’s because schools reinforce lessons through homework and assignments. In the same way, effective soft skills training reinforces the teachings introduced during courses. Follow-up emails, quizzes, and recap videos all act to refresh employees and keep important information top of mind, well after training sessions have concluded.
Further Soft Skills Training Content Considerations
Setting up a functioning soft skills training program is complex; thankfully the process is much easier by partnering with an eLearning company who has soft skills training programs ready to roll out. Not to mention, HSI can be your single-source provider as besides soft skills courses, we have a comprehensive range of training needs, spanning from HR compliance, professional development, safety, industrial skills, and more!
No matter which approach you plan on taking, there are a few further considerations HR and L&D leaders should be aware of before they start making critical decisions in regard to their training strategy.
Adult Learning Theory
A key question business leaders must consider when introducing soft skills training is: How will they effectively introduce the the training to employees?
Keep in mind, adults don't learn the same way children do, but some educational content is written or designed as if they did.
Adult learning theory provides helpful guidelines for companies looking to boost soft skills development within their organization. It stipulates that because adults learn differently from children, the learning process must be tailored to their specifications.
Adult learners have different backgrounds and experiences, and L&D leaders need to account for factors like these when implementing soft skills training.
Changing Behavior
Developing soft skills is about changing behavior. The problem for businesses is that human behavior is complex.
Getting team members to communicate with each other in a more productive way isn’t a simple matter of incentivizing that communication, or alternatively, punishing failure to do so. You can’t simply penalize an employee for not communicating with their team.
Rather, L&D leaders can leverage blended learning to promote changes in behavior over a period of time. Blended learning combines digital and online learning with face-to-face instructor-led classes. This enables learners to have some control over their learning path, and gives them the ability to move ahead at their own pace. To see how this works in action, learn how our customer, Conway Corp increases self-directed learning engagement with a blended-learning approach.
To really change behavior, employees can watch a series of videos on their own prior to the instructor-led class, and then discuss the content and roleplay situations that apply to their position. Working through a problem or situation you’re currently facing in a roleplay scenario can actually help employees determine how to handle the situation at hand.
Videos can also be used as training reinforcement after the class to support the transfer of knowledge from short-term memory to long-term memory and change behavior.
Benefits of Soft Skills Training
Many interoffice conflicts stem from communication breakdowns or misunderstandings. Soft skills training seeks to eliminate these damaging miscommunications and ensure that a team operates at its most efficient and respectful level.
Soft skills training can mean the difference between:
- Leadership vs bullying
- Constructive feedback vs condemnation
- Assertiveness vs aggression
- Determination vs disruption
- Creativity vs anarchy
The benefits of an effective soft skills training program are plentiful. Soft skills can influence everything from the way employees communicate with customers to the way they solve problems internally. It’s not an overstatement to suggest that improved soft skills training can influence nearly every aspect of a business operation in a positive way.
One final note: it's possible to place too much emphasis on a single soft skill, especially at a certain level within the organization. Some L&D leaders spend an inordinate amount of their training budget on senior management or executive positions. Yet, professionals at all levels will benefit from soft skills training. Soft skills training allows pros to become better communicators and better employees. In the end, soft skills training is vital for both businesses and professionals.
HSI Can Help
HSI offers businesses a wide array of microlearning soft skills training topics. It's nearly impossible for an internal training team to be able to create courses for 100% of their employees for 100% of their individual needs. From offering feedback for growth to improving empathy in the workplace to decision making, HSI is dedicated to providing the most comprehensive and useful eLearning resources for forward-thinking professionals. Check out a list of our soft skills training topics.
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