Soft Skills vs. Hard Skills
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I often thing about the notion of soft skills versus hard skills and which one is more important to hone throughout your career. And each time that I think about this debate I come to the same conclusion — soft skills are more important than hard skills. To me, there’s two factors that contribute to this conclusion.
1. Hard Skills Have Limits
As much as people like to believe that hard skills are all that you need to succeed I strongly disagree with this notion. Obviously “succeed” is subjective here, but generally speaking, hard skills can only take you so far in 99% of cases. Barring you being truly exceptional (I’m talking generational talent), there will come a point where soft skills, not technical skills, are what prevents you from progressing further in your career.
This is due in large part to the fact that continuously having larger impact often correlates to working with more and more people. And as you work with more and more people to increase your scope of work and impact, your soft skills are what you’ll need to rely on. At a certain point, in most cases, your technical skills will likely plateau and the scope and impact that you can deliver will likely be limited to your own time and output.
Contrast this with leaning into your people skills and you can leverage your soft skills to help orchestrate, lead, and deliver larger projects with larger scope by “steering” larger groups of people towards a common goal. When you leverage these skills you’re better able to expand your sphere of influence and the “limit” of what you accomplish becomes more directly tied to the amount of people you can direct as opposed to how many hours you have in a day to work on something directly.
2. Soft Skills are Hard to Learn
Albeit hard to explain this point I believe most people will understand what I mean when I say that soft skills are difficult to learn. To me, soft skills largely feel like something you either understand (and have) or you don’t. Sure, someone can improve their soft skills, but doing so can often feel robotic.
People learning what to say and how to use certain words or phrases in order to influence others comes across as weirdly robotic as opposed to just intuitively understanding how to effectively interface with others. In my opinion, the best way to “learn” soft skills is to simply connect with others through genuine means. It feels akin to networking: people often view networking as shaking hands and exchanging resumes, but I view it as making friends as an adult. Help others because it’s the right thing to do and you’ll be surprised what others will do in return.
In the workplace it’s no different. If a teammate needs help, lend a hand. If another team is asking you to meet a deadline, do your best to deliver high quality work and ahead of schedule. The best way to become good with people is to do deeds that are good for people.
Hard skills, on the other hand, are much simpler to learn and are less nuanced than soft skills which, to me, makes them less valuable. Unlike soft skills, I view developing hard skills as a function of time. While it can be difficult to grok certain technical concepts and build a deep technical understanding of a field I believe the path to doing so is much more clear cut than the “road-map” to developing soft skills.
Do Both
While it likely goes without saying, the most ideal scenario is to develop both your hard skills and your soft skills. Having one is great, but possessing both can make you truly exceptional.
In most cases, each person I’ve worked with I can clearly categorize into groups of possessing better hard skills or soft skills. While they have largely each had some combination of the two, it’s been very rare for me to find (if ever) someone who is truly exceptional at both.
While I’d argue it’s almost impossibly hard to possess the two equally at extremely high levels of competence, it’s something we should all strive for. And if you have to settle for one, my recommendation is to index on soft skills. I believe they have the potential to take your further over the long-run and are inherently harder to learn and develop. Developing hard skills on the other hand are largely a function of time and effort.
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Hard skills can help you start a career and soft skills can help you excel it