What you know vs Who you are
What’s more important, what you know or who you are?
It turns out that, even (or particularly) when you are applying for a job, it is the latter that matters much more. To be honest, nobody will openly say so, but if you don’t get a job because the other candidate who is less experienced and talks in a very simple way, omitting detailed (actually confusing) explanations, or has not as good academic achievement, who is apparently self-aware and adaptable with strong sense of humor has been hired, you may be sure that’s because of who they are, not because of what they know. It’s their because of their soft skills- people skills- interpersonal skills, or, as Lou Adler prefers to call them, non-technical skills, and not hard skills-technical skills that distinguish them as superior.
Yes, it may sound frustrating that your knowledge lost battle with their personality, but that exactly is what happens. On today’s work-market, soft skills are increasingly becoming the hard skills of today's work force. They are not as easy to measure or assess as technical ones, but seem to be crucial in absolutely every segment of our lives. So, despite the fact that you are an expert as far as the required technical skills are concerned, if you are a person who is rigid, impatient and/or intolerant you are not much of neither a team player nor you are right person for a position that requires training of other candidates or colleagues, or working in a team.
There is no doubt that technical skills (whatever they may be depending on the occupation) are very important, they are still something that can be learned, supplemented, upgraded, and perfected. People skills, well, that’s another, more difficult story. And even though difficult doesn’t mean impossible, this kind of training takes much more time and effort.
So, knowing that it's just not enough to be highly trained in technical skills, without developing the softer, interpersonal and relationship-building skills that help people to communicate and collaborate effectively, and having in mind that Anyone can change, but not Everyone is willing to…
Well, you can either continue working exclusively on your hard skills, or you might decide to at least check where you stand when it comes to soft skills. There’s a very nice link providing list of traits considered as soft skills, so that may be a good start. Just get in there and you can work on your own if you believe you’re introspective and objective enough, you can ask your friends, family members and colleagues to help you with this and see what they say, or you can do both and see how different people perceive you and current status of your soft skills http://jobsearch.about.com/od/skills/fl/soft-skills.htm.
If you decide to do some more reading, Internet is full of articles on soft skills written from different perspectives. Even better, you can search them one by one.
Should you decide to work on developing your soft skills, there are numerous ways to do it. You can either apply for Assertive Communication Training, which is official technique teaching rules of assertive communication (“Assertive communication involves respect for the boundaries of oneself and others. It also presumes an interest in the fulfillment of needs and wants through cooperation”, Wikipedia), you can pick any of spiritual techniques focused on personal development altogether or decide to go to psychotherapy which has the same goal, personal development and can also help you correct some of your personality traits and transform them from sort of flaws to soft skills.
Options are there, as always, so … Suit yourself.
by Vasilija Ida Vasić, Psychologist