The 4 most sought after soft skills

Soft skills are just as important throughout your time at university as they are in the workplace or in your daily life. As they are transferable across every industry, most companies value the same soft skills. Here is the list of the top 5 soft skills. And most importantly, how you can improve them moving forward in your career journey. 

Presentation skills 

Where have you already developed that skill?

As part of your university degree, you probably did some presentations. Perfect, it means you already work on your presentation skills.

How can you improve it?

There are loads of ways you can improve your presentation skills:

• When you have the chance to present, make sure you always ask for feedback from your audience
• Film yourself when practicing - you might be doing things that you didn’t even realise, like looking down, not smiling, not making eye contact or not pausing often enough - watching yourself back is the best way to spot these habits.
• When you are watching presentations take note of things you like and dislike about the way people speak, their slides and how they interact with the audience
• YouTube is full of videos that give great advice on how to improve your presentation skills. Don’t hesitate to make use of this resource.

Teamwork 

Where have you already developed that skill?

You acquired teamwork and people skills from doing group projects at university, which is required for most degrees..

How can you improve it?

After each group project, reflect on your involvement in the project:

• Did you initiate conversations and organise time to work together? 
• Did you take more of a background role? 
• Who put the project together? 
• Who did the bulk of the work? 
• Did you listen to everyone’s views and ask quieter group members for their opinions?
• Did you run into any challenges? If so, how did you work together to resolve them?

Ask yourself these questions and then identify areas where you can improve, where you can delegate more and where you can push yourself out of your comfort zone. 

Organisation

Where have you already developed that skill?

At university, you had to juggle multiple deadlines, projects and attending teaching hours alongside your social life and extracurricular activities. So you already practiced a lot and know this is a vital skill.

How can you improve it?

Find an organisation technique that suits you : 

• If you find you are always losing your to-do lists, try switching to apps such as ‘Todoist’ or ‘Monday’
• If you have a busy schedule, get comfortable using a digital calendar that you can update whilst you’re out and about, and make sure you have an automatic alert on for events so you’re always reminded of what’s coming up
• If you get distracted easily, use extensions such as StayFocusd to block social media sites whilst you’re trying to get stuff done

Communication

Where have you already developed that skill?

You have been working on your communication skills for almost your whole life. Formally, by doing group work at school and university, and informally, with your friends and family. The ability to communicate effectively with your colleagues, wider team, bosses or clients is an important part of your professional skill set and adapting the way you communicate to different audiences is something we all do naturally.

How can you improve it?

Communication is a skill that is improved mostly by practice, but there are some things to keep in mind that can help you communicate more effectively: It’s important that you take time to work on your listening as well as your talking skills 

Try and be mindful of how much you listen in conversations. If you find out you do more talking than listening, think about whether this impacts your ability to summarise the conversation or relay information. When developing your communication skills, don’t forget to think about your audience. Actively thinking about what your audience needs from your conversation and the way they like to receive information will help you to communicate more effectively and build stronger relationships with different audiences as you transition into the working world.