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Employers are having a tough time finding qualified people with the background and experience to fill jobs, including locating employees with behavioral or soft skills.
An IBM survey reported by Bloomberg found that along with technical skills, employers are valuing behavioral skills as critical. There is an emphasis on soft skills, “such as the ability to work well on a team, communication, creativity, and empathy are best developed through experience rather than structured learning programs like a webinar.”
Kate Davidson in her Wall Street Journal article, wrote that soft skills “…can make the difference between a standout employee and one who just gets by.”
I like referring to soft skills as employability-success skills because they help someone get a job, but also move up the career ladder. They are not unique to a particular occupation or industry, but are required among all business sizes, utilized by the entry-level worker to executive suite. Across the world of work, people need to be capable communicators, team members, problem solvers and relationship builders.
Thinking about moving the needle on these critical employability-success skill sets at your organization? A few actions for your consideration:
- Conduct a needs analysis of your current workforce to inventory depth of strength of their employability-success skills.
- Ensure your management and supervisory team possess these skills as they are role models for the rest of the organization.
- Utilize behavioral and situational interviewing to hire people with the selected skills.
- Offer employability-skills training with the day to day experience as an opportunity to develop and reinforce these skills.
- Integrate employability-success skills into the performance management process to reward the required behaviors and to develop them where the need is identified.
- Evaluate project team and work group performance not only for meeting deliverables, but also how the overall and individual team members performed on the employability-success skills dimensions.