Everything You Need to Know about Hard and Soft Skills
You may have heard the words "hard skills" and "soft skills" tossed around at your job, but what do these terms actually mean? The main difference is that hard skills focus on what you are doing, while soft skills focus on how you are doing them. For example, you will rely on hard skills when you use technical knowledge to accomplish a task and on soft skills when you use emotional awareness to accomplish a task. Despite their names that imply otherwise, hard and soft skills are equally important to your career's success. Individuals should strive for a balance between the two: you don't want to be strictly a technical expert with zero social skills, nor a popular social butterfly with no earthly idea how to do the functional elements of your job. Here are a few examples of hard and soft skills from Indeed.com. [1] Hard Skills: Bilingual Database management SEO marketing Data mining Java Network security Soft Skills: Dependability Open-mindedness Problem-sol...