Have you ever received feedback from your tech manager that you should improve your communication skills? Or that you should increase visibility for your work? Oh! Another one, that you should work on your influencing skills? All of these above are related to soft skills and it can be confusing of what they really mean and how to improve them.

As a tech person, I used to see my tech manager giving that feedback regularly to tech engineers. About half of the team get it, however, the other half roll their eyes and reply:

“ Soft skill? Pfft, I’m an engineer, I don’t need that. All I have to do is code harder and learn about technologies A and B and I’ll keep on going”

And that’s where they’re wrong, as sadly. I had seen such neglecting of soft skills ending up costing many of them years of stagnation for their tech career. The same could happen to you, or might already be happening to you without you realising it.

Let’s get started with defining the skills and why it matters.

What are Soft Skills?

Generally, soft skills have something to do with things that can be measured quantitatively and are often measured qualitatively. They often have to do with traits related to how someone behaves and how they lead themselves, even when they interact with other humans.

Important to note that soft skills are difficult to measure not because they don’t matter. Soft Skills can definitely be improved and developed. Soft skills include things like leadership, public speaking, motivation and others that might be related.

Teamwork skills, what is that?

There’s another set of skills that I see often ignored: teamwork skills.

Unless you want to live in a cave and be totally off the grid, you’ll have to interact with people to get things done and if things you work on end up being successful, more people will join and you will find a way to work effectively as an organisation.

In a way, you could consider that teamwork skills are just a part of soft skills. Teamwork skills include things like leadership, delegation, management and so on.

To grasp the importance of soft skills, teamwork skills ensure that soft skills are used at the right time with the right amount in a group of teammates and delivering toward the correct objectives.