Soft skills are necessary and essential for your career. You cannot rely on only hard (technical) skills alone. Soft skills influence how you act and what you do, which is important to human relations.

My goal for this post is to provide you with some ways in which I am proving my soft skills.

Seek Challenges

When you challenge yourself, you know that you are helping yourself grow. If you are doing things that are “easy” for you, you will remain stagnant and eventually fall behind. This can be detrimental to your career as a software developer.

When you take on challenges, you set yourself up for a win-win situation. If the challenge was too difficult for you, then you learned something new and know where your current skill level limit is. You were also able to reach out of your comfort zone, which is another valuable soft skill to learn. If you reach success then you learned something new and you boost your level of self-confidence.

Set Clear and Specific Goals

When you set clear and specific goals, you make it easy to keep yourself accountable. For example, you want to have features x, y, and z with each feature working in a specific way. When it is broken down in such a way, it is easy to see that each feature is present or not. In addition, others would be able to see if the feature is present or not, which makes you accountable for those features.

Seek Feedback

When you work with other people, always try to seek feedback when possible. Sometimes, you do not know what you can do to improve unless someone tells you. For example, the way you communicate and deliver information makes perfect sense to you and probably anyone else that has a similar learning style. However, the person you are working with may not have a similar learning style and the way you do things does not make sense to them. By asking for feedback, you expose yourself to various learning styles and learn how to communicate best with a variety of learning styles.

Take Responsibility

Take responsibility and be accountable for the results of your work. If something was wrong, acknowledge that you made a mistake and then fix it. Do not try to make excuses for what went wrong because that will not solve the problem. By taking responsibility, you establish and improve your leadership skills.

Learn to Listen

The importance of speaking is always spoken about when it comes to effective communication. However, the ability to listen is as important as speaking. When you genuinely listen to people, it can help improve relationships, solve problems, ensure understanding and much more.

Some ways you can try to improve your listening skill are:

• Making eye contact
• Investing yourself fully in each interaction
• Considering the situation from the speaker’s perspective
• Let the speaker finish talking before you talk

Be Adaptable

Being adaptable is important for your life, not just in the workplace. By practicing to be adaptable, it can help you become a strong leader by making you more understanding, reasonable, and tactful. Adaptability also increases your ability to communicate with others and build strong relationships.

Some ways you can try to improve your adaptability skill are:

• Being open-minded and not judgmental
• Being self-aware
• Being flexible
• Be open to ambiguity
• Thinking creatively

I hope you found this post helpful. If you found this post helpful, share it with others so they can benefit too.

What are your experiences with soft skills? Was there a time when you found your soft skill was more useful than your technical skills?

Leave a comment, send me a tweet, or send me an email at steven@brightdevelopers.com. To stay in touch, you can follow me on Twitter.