Soft Skills are true work tools when it comes to interpersonal relationships within the company, and therefore, as we go to university, we also have to improve or create this type of skills to build a successful career. In this article we cover the main online available platforms that you can use for free.
Soft kills are subjective skills, usually difficult to identify and directly related to people’s emotional intelligence. These skills are usually acquired through experiences over time – and, in most cultures, not in books and courses. Soft skills are different from the so-called hard skills – skills that normally enter the curriculum and are learned in universities, schools, internships, and even at work, and that are specific to each area. The iCIMS Hiring Insights (2017) found that “94% of recruitment professionals believe that an employee with stronger soft skills is more likely to be promoted to a better position”.
Despite being slightly more subjective, the main soft skills are largely identified as effective communication – Have you ever wanted to convey an idea, but ended up being misunderstood? Exactly!
True and effective communication includes the transmission and interpretation of ideas in a way that you can pass on to someone else exactly what you are trying to say. Communicative skills also include listening carefully, writing well, knowing how to act in different situations, understanding what is being said and having the ability and ease to perform teamwork. In short: it is not enough to speak well. For communication to be effective, leadership and persuasive skills are required.
In addition to communication, there are many other soft skills that are highly valued in the job market, such as creativity – an employee with creative thinking can bring unique alternatives to your company in a crisis situation. Resilience also appears as one of the most important competences: a person with this capacity and psychological maturity can recover very quickly after facing adversity, being therefore, in the market, an employee who can easily work under stress, deal with problems and adapt to more demanding situations.
Empathy and leadership are other extremely important soft skills for working as a team, both for the working relationship between colleagues and for leaders who need to earn the trust of their work teams.
Despite the valuation of hard skills over soft skills, in the case of leadership, subjectivity ceases to exist, and this skill will certainly score the recruitment of an employee who is applying for a leadership position. As, for example, in the recruitment of Teleperformance, where our team leaders have to have this skill ascertained by the difficulty that appears in the leadership of a team with 200 or 300 people.
Here are some suggestions for improving soft skills without spending any money:
Open.edu
OpenLearn is a free learning platform, delivered by The Open University. Delivers bite-sized learning experiences designed to fit easily into daily life. Doesn’t have requirements to access all the free materials.
Classcentral
Aggregates content from many providers to help you find the best courses on almost any subject, wherever they exist. They are like a search engine for soft skill courses, like Google.
Alison.com
Alison is one of the world’s largest free learning platforms for education and skills training. It is a for-profit social enterprise dedicated to making it possible for anyone, to study anything, anywhere, at any time, online.
Futurelearn
Offers a diverse selection of courses from leading universities and cultural institutions from around the world. These are delivered one step at a time, and are accessible on mobile, tablet and desktop, so you can fit learning around your life
Coursera
Every course on Coursera is taught by top instructors from world-class universities and companies. Hundreds of free courses give you access to on-demand video lectures, homework exercises, and community discussion forums.
edX
edX is a trusted platform for education and learning. Founded by Harvard and MIT, edX is home to more than 20 million learners, the majority of top-ranked universities in the world and industry-leading companies. It’s a global nonprofit platform.
Udemy
Udemy is an online learning platform aimed at professional adults and students, developed in May 2010. Courses mostly for improving job-related skills.
Skillshare
Online learning community with thousands of classes for creative and curious people, on topics including illustration, design, photography, video, freelancing but for soft skills as well.
Sometimes it can be difficult to know what skills we should improve, if you are not sure what they are, this questionnaire can help you to have a more concrete idea:
https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test
If you consider yourself a communicative and empathetic person and working as a team is what you love, why not join our multicultural team?
Consult the various offers that Teleperformance has available at jobs.teleperformance.pt
Teleperformance videos
