Soft Skills

Soft skills cover a variety of issues, and include a range of both personal and interpersonal qualities. I am of the opinion that soft skills are often undervalued, and this is an unfortunate situation. Many soft skills are considered transferable, as they are not industry specific and carry between careers/sectors.

Below are what I consider to be some of the more important soft skills I've been developing over the last year:

Time Management
Coming to this course I had no hope of managing my time successfully. I'd never really needed to before. However, the stresses and strains of a bigger workload and juggling this with other commitments had made me need to develop my time management skills. I now feel so much more confident with my self-management.

Personal Development/Reflective Work
I feel I now have a much greater ability to be self-critical, analysing my weak (and strong) points, and working out a way forward. This has helped me to move on over the past year, and develop new skills as I've needed them.

Ability to Transmit Energy, Enthusiasm & Confidence
Steve recently mentioned this one on a thread on Das Forum. It struck me that this is something I've improved on. Believe it or not, I used to be pretty nervous about showing any of my work to anyone, and I used to hate having to ask for help in shops, using the phone, etc. Now I don't have a problem with this as much. I've developed a new confidence, and I hope I can begin to show this through the way I act during presentations and pitches (hopefully I don't touch myself as much anymore!)

I also feel I have a variety of other soft skills, but that the above are the ones I've worked on most over the past year. However, there are great many skills that I still need to work on a lot over the coming months and years. These include:

• Team working/communication
• Leadership skills/people management

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