how to be human: the power of soft skills

Think about it. In a world of self-service checkouts, virtual personal assistants, driverless cars and automated factories, job security is looking like a thing of the past.

Are you going to be spending years studying and training for a job that Wall-E will be doing by the time you’re thirty?

The Guardian are a bit concerned that lecturers in financially struggling unis will soon be replaced by AI technology in digital classrooms. 
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That’s not all, a BBC article back in June came out with the shocking statistic that, by 2030, 20 million factory jobs alone will have been taken over by robots. 

Okay, we admit, that all sounds a bit Armageddon-y. But you know what we’re getting at. In an ever changing, tech crazy world, where can you even start to think about what job you might want to do in the future?

Who knows, lots of the future jobs available to the students of today might barely even exist yet. So now’s a good time to think about future-proofing your choices and your crucial hard skills.

By that, we mean the knowledge and training you require for a specific or set of specific job roles, like engineering, carpentry, teaching, brain surgery, or whatever your vocation might require.

That’s the inflexible, career-specific know how.

But how do you make sure they’ll stand up to the test of time? Well, the best way is to develop your soft skills alongside the hard skills.

Soft skills are just as important if not more, they’re the things that help you survive the big bad world and whatever it might throw at you.

Think…

• Verbal and written communication
• Confidence
• Leadership
• Teamwork
• Problem solving
• Flexibility and adaptability

These are things that will get you far in life no matter what the job market may look like, and make up the human touch that sets us apart from the “unexpected item in bagging area” bots.

The best part about these soft skills? You’ve been developing them your whole life. Probably without noticing, most of the time. And you’ll keep developing them throughout college, uni, training, work, volunteering, travelling, or whatever it is you choose to do.

Sure, hard skills are usually key when it comes to nailing your dream job. No one wants to be operated on by a basket-weaving graduate. But the unique soft skills are what employers crave.
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They set you apart, bring you to life from a name and a set of grades on a piece of paper, and make you irreplaceable.

Author

LUCY HARDING is an English Literature grad and an MA Publishing student at UCL. She is passionate about international relations and cultural diversity, having worked closely with her university’s Erasmus society to support European students. She also spent a year abroad studying at California State University: Long Beach