Soft Skills Every IT Professional Needs
Posted December 20th, 2013
To progress up the corporate ladder, every worker needs two types of skills. These are:
- hard skills- easy to list of a resume, easy to quantify and easy to highlight
- soft skills or intangible nice-to-haves – are harder to prove, harder to quantify, harder to highlight
Hard skills are important. They are the minimum requirement to land an interview. If the job description states that you must be proficient in Perl, then you must be proficient in Perl. However, soft skills can be the difference in continuing your search and accepting the job offer.
Companies want to hire technology workers who have the following soft skills:
- Empathy. Because of the highly technical nature of (well) information technology, it can be difficult to understand the point of view of a non-technical end user or manager. If you can understand where they are coming from, their viewpoints and their work environments, you will be able to design GUIs that are appealing and intuitive.
- Relationship-building skills – There are very few jobs available out there that allow an employee to simply sit at a workstation all day. Building productive, respectful relationships up, down and across the corporate entity (as well as outside of it) are of upmost importance. You never know who you are going to be asked to work with or what project team you will be placed on.
- Communication skills – Jargon only works between two experts to succinctly define a certain concept. However, it is not useful between IT and other functional departments. The ability to translate high-tech, highly abstract concepts into something that can be understood by everyone is a “must-have” skill.
- Business acumen – You need to understand how IT benefits other departments and how it can affect the company’s bottom line. In other words, you need to be able to define the tangible business benefits of your work.
- Knowledge sharing skills – Just because you can “do” does not mean that you can teach others to “do”. If you can work side by side someone but also teach them new applications, you become a valuable resource. Most people learn about different systems and programs on the job, not in a certification class. In addition, your relationship building skills play a central part in this process. You must communicate, listen and be patient with others’ learning curves.
- Embrace the “gray” – IT is known for being very black and white. However, many issues – because of the people involved – are “gray”. There is no right answer. There is usually compromise. If you can learn to pinpoint and communicate a problem and then work with others to find a solution, then you become instrumental in getting projects completed on time and on budget.
At Bayside, we know how to find the soft skills that every IT professional needs. Therefore, if you need to find a qualified IT professional in the Bay Area, contact us today. If you are looking for IT Staffing in the Bay Area, we are here to help!
