Soft Skills You Need for 2021 and How To Develop Them
You made it to 2021, congratulations. The carols and Christmas trees are well gone, and you’re now face-to-face with your New Year’s resolutions (because January didn’t count) and the pandemic that’s still out there.
Perhaps one of the things you resolved to improve this year is your soft skills. It’s February, how well are you doing? What soft skills are you developing—you know you can’t just develop them all at once, right?
If you’re trying to develop your soft skills, it’s wise to think of it as a project where you determine which soft skills you want to develop and how you want to go about it. This article is written for this reason: to highlight seven soft skills you can develop for the new year and how to develop them.
Soft skills are quite simply intangible skills that show how you relate to yourself and others in the workplace. They are also skills that reflect your ability to be able to do your job based on practices you have developed.
While your technical skills as a programmer are great (because you can do the job), soft skills will go a long way in determining what people think of you in the workplace and how you advance in your career as a result of it.
This soft skill is super important for you as a programmer. Because the nature of the job requires you to wait for code to finish compiling, it’s important for you to use that time wisely to accomplish pending tasks. If you don’t do this (and instead spend the time may be playing online games or browsing social media sites), you might find yourself feeling a deep sense of underachievement.
If you work as a freelance programmer, you’ll probably find that you need to work on multiple pieces of code, communicate with clients, job hunt on freelancing websites, all while dealing with the distractions of working from home. Time management will help you to stay on top of your deliverables and ensure that you don’t feel overwhelmed.
The benefits of time management include improving your wellness—as you manage your time to include health-boosting activities such as eating a healthy snack, sneaking in a yoga session, or taking a short nap.
The benefits of time management include boosting your self-esteem, keeping you productive, helping to put structure to your calendar, delivering on schedule, and improving your well-being.
To manage your time effectively, you need to master multitasking. Multitasking involves using the time to accomplish multiple tasks. So when you have a spare moment, you slot in a task, e.g., answering an email, returning a phone call, or baking bread.
Practice multitasking in small phases, and build proficiency in it. Before long, you’ll discover that you’re better at time management than you used to be. For instance, you can decide to spend three hours multitasking for a start. You may follow these steps:
This soft skill becomes more important, especially as you progress in your career or you start to work as a freelancer or contractor. You’ll need to listen to your clients to understand exactly what they want and not what you think they want. You’ll also have to listen to C-suite executives to determine what trajectory they want the company to go in. Listening helps you to become more aware of your work environment and the solutions you need to be providing.
Listening helps you to avoid conflicts caused by misunderstanding and to become a team player. It also helps you to take note of nonverbal cues, understand challenges from the perspective of the speaker, and get a better understanding of how to tackle the problem. It guarantees a better outcome in conflict resolution.
Developing a listening skill requires patience and open-mindedness: patience to hear the other person out, and open-mindedness to receive what they’re saying.
When you spend long hours behind a computer, occupied with your own thoughts, it can be hard to think of collaboration and teamwork—especially if you are working on a personal project. However, it’s important for you to think outside the confines of your personal space and collaborate with others whether you’re using a collaborative tool or meeting face-to-face.
Not only will it show you as a team player—which is crucial for your career growth—but it helps the team be more productive. Being a team player helps you to think outside the box, seeking solutions that will help the team and boost your value. You want people to be able to think of you as an integral part of the team, a must-have. Being a team player makes it easy for those who matter to recommend you for bigger opportunities.
Collaboration helps your team to be more productive. It increases your value on the team and makes you integral to the operations of the organization. It also boosts your self-esteem and makes you recommendable.
Sometimes it’s hard for people to be team players not because they don’t want to be but because their temperament makes them naturally withdrawn or they have some social anxiety. These tips can help you to develop this soft skill so that you can become an asset to whatever team/organization you’re a part of.
Conflicts will arise over one thing or another—it’s inevitable. This is why you must be prepared for it by building a soft skill that helps you to negotiate and resolve conflicts peacefully. Again, this is a soft skill that needs much practice, especially if you’re working from home.
In a team, there’s always an opportunity for you to compromise and make room for others. A good team player does their best to resolve conflicts amicably and keep their focus on the purpose of the group.
With your words, you can deescalate a fiery situation by offering something else other than a “no.” Think of it as an exchange; you get something by giving something.
Having negotiation and conflict resolution skills helps you to get along with others and maintain productivity. It will also show you as one who is very much in control of their environment—fighting with a team member or client does not do very well for your reputation. Remember, these soft skills make you a candidate for better opportunities, so build this skill not just for others but for yourself too.
To develop negotiation and conflict resolution soft skills, it is important to constantly think of solutions. How can you improve the situation, and what would make everyone feel better?
This is a super important soft skill that shows you care. No matter what they tell you, people want to feel cared for and understood. Empathy isn’t pity or sympathy; it’s really putting yourself in the other’s shoes and responding appropriately to their situation.
As you spend more time in programming and overcoming challenges on your own, it can seem difficult to extend empathy to others, especially if you’re a self-motivated high achiever who’s used to accomplishing a lot on their own.
Empathy simply shows you to be a decent person—it’s really that simple. It also helps you to be able to mentor upcoming programmers. If you’re thinking of management roles, this is a soft skill you definitely want to develop.
Empathy is an opportunity for you to extend grace to someone else, especially when you don’t understand what they may be going through. It greatly improves your reputation and what others think about you.
It is important to always think of solutions. People gravitate toward problem solvers. And to be able to solve problems, you need to be creative. To be creative, you need to think outside the box. The author of Unlocking Creativity suggests that we explore alternative ways of thinking that can be applied to any project regardless of how far they are from our comfort zones.
Take your client’s jobs one step higher. Think of ways you can make your coding better. Think of ways you can cause technology to interact with humans in a way that touches them deeply. For instance, how would you develop a mobile app that tells people when they are dehydrated? Or how would you design an app that can gauge emotions and prompt the user to take action based on its findings? To be a truly creative programmer, you need to constantly think outside the box, seeking solutions and writing code that facilitates it.
Being a creative person can be uncomfortable and challenging because it demands that you think beyond the boundaries of convention and comfort. But remaining creative and improving your creativity will ensure that you’re always doing good work.
This is perhaps the most important soft skill you need if you’re freelancing or working remotely. With no one to supervise you but yourself, you must be self-motivated to keep working when you don’t feel like it.
Self-motivation will compel you to pursue self-development courses and do regular skills assessments to determine if you’re up to date with best practices. It will take you from handling simple tasks to handling complex ones. And if you’re developing your creativity, it will help you to stay grounded as you keep searching for the right solutions to problems or ways to make your code run faster.
Sometimes you’re all you have, and you’ll need to inspire yourself to work harder and be better. Try not to be hard on yourself; do the best you can, and reward yourself often.
To develop any soft skill, you’ll need to be open-minded. I say this often because your mind is the gateway to any accomplishment. Your mind determines whether you will accept new concepts and ways of behavior. It will even determine how well you are able to apply and continue these new changes.
Open-mindedness will help you to explore unconventional ways to provide solutions to problems. It will also help you to think of problems in a way that most people don’t. For instance, many people think of math as a difficult problem, but can you think of math as comic relief? Can you design a math game that elicits rib-cracking laughter? How would you apply this idea to design a live chat?
You’ll also need to be accountable, practice new changes often, be patient with yourself, and evaluate yourself often.
Luna Baker is a senior web developer at LaravelLions. Laravel Lions provide the finest web solutions across various industry sectors. our company gives spontaneous, innovative, and unique solutions along with maintaining higher standards and guidelines.
