Beyond Degrees: Master These Soft Skills to Secure Your Dream Job

When you enrol in a professional course or any other course, you acquire hard measurable skills for a profession. In the end, you earn a degree that acts like a measuring scale for your abilities. However, employers look for more. They look for candidates with good soft skills. 

Soft skills can also be thought of as people skills. It refers to your professional behaviour, interpersonal skills, roles you play in a team, your unique traits and other such attributes. Unlike hard skills that can be actively taught to students, soft skills are acquired and developed through experiences in your daily life and learning environment. That’s why it’s important to enrol in a girls college in Kolkata that can provide you with that sort of nurturing environment. 

Develop these soft skills to impress employers at the job interview:

1. Problem solving 

This is one of the most important soft skills you need to develop to land your dream job. Employers don’t want you to be a lost lamb when you come across tricky situations or complex problems at work. Instead, they want people who can tackle problems head on and try to find a solution. While your seniors and peers are there to help you out, they have their own responsibilities and targets to meet and may not be available to extend a helping hand at critical times.  

Employers would test your problem-solving skills during the job interview to throw you out of your comfort zone and figure out how you handle challenging situations. Make sure to choose a womens college in Kolkata that provides you with a nurturing environment in the form of cultural and club activities. 

2. Adaptability

Adaptability is another highly valued soft skill employers actively look for. Change is the only constant in any organisation and managers or job providers don’t want employees who can’t adjust to those changing situations. Critical thinkers are often highly adaptable individuals. They have the ability to identify ambiguity and question popularly held assumptions. This makes them approach problems with a practical lens and are highly flexible. Students can become critical thinkers and more adaptable with extracurricular activities and more guidance. 

When you join one of the best girls colleges in Kolkata that provides those opportunities, you are more likely to pick up on those skills. For instance, mentoring programs work wonders to make students more flexible. If colleges had a mentoring program where a teacher provides one-on-one guidance to small student groups and encourages active discussion on disagreeable topics, it would teach students to be more flexible. Ramakrishna Sarada Mission Vivekananda Vidyabhavan is an institution that believes in holistic development for its students and offers such mentorship programs to make them more job-worthy. 

3. Communication 

Effective communication skills are essential for any kind of job or other aspects of your life. Developing this skill helps you become more successful in your career. Strong communication doesn’t refer to being aggressive or just blunt for no reason. Instead, you need to get your point across in a professional and diplomatic manner. Essentially, you need to communicate clearly with your seniors, peers, clients, stakeholders and other parties to become an integral part of the team. 

Even If you have good communication skills, you may struggle to convey your thoughts clearly in English. Unfortunately, most corporations, MNCs and companies in India use English as a primary communication language. If that’s a weak point, consider getting add-on courses from a reputable girl’s college for Communicative English. These courses are designed to upgrade your fluency in English and make you a more confident communicator to crack the interview.  

4. Technology Skills

As a student in the digital age, you grew up with smartphones, and computers and saw drastic changes around you as you transitioned from paying in cash to scanning the QR code. However, as the business landscape changes, some jobs expect professionals to bring in their technology skills.

For instance, as more tech startups spring up in the country, they want individuals to be familiar with technology for using, testing and finding bugs in their tools. That’s why you need to be comfortable with technology. On the other hand, if those jobs demand hard technical skills, you can always strengthen those with a professional course after graduation.  

Unlike hard measurable skills, soft skills are subjective. That’s what makes them incredibly valuable and may become the deciding factor for hiring, when two people have the same background. Hard skills qualify you for a position while soft skills allow you to leave an impression.