Professional development and training plays an important role in all successful businesses, as it allows employees to sharpen existing skills, acquire new ones, and enable them to take on different or more challenging responsibilities. Often, employers focus on ‘hard skills’ – practical capabilities that can be demonstrated or measured in a controlled way – such as data entry, coding, plant operation, or speaking a foreign language.
‘Soft skills’ training, however, is equally beneficial, covering a wide range of essential inter-personal, self-knowledge, and communication competencies – which are applicable to most jobs in the workplace. 
What Is Soft Skills Training?
The focus of soft skills training is to improve personal qualities and abilities rather than the technical side of a job role. A programme of soft skills training should be targeted to the needs of the individual employee and the business’s priorities, but will usually hone in on transferable skills that are applicable to many different job roles or workplace environments. Common soft skills include:
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Communication
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Teamwork
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Problem-solving
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Dispute resolution
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Time management
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Adaptability
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Leadership
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Solo/remote working
Hard skills are easier to assess through structured KPIs, for example through formal tests or assignments, and to confirm an employee’s competence in a specific area. For instance, a typist or secretary can complete a simple data entry test to establish their words per minute rate. In comparison, soft skills are harder to measure because they are more to do with personality traits than technical abilities.
Why Are Soft Skills Important In The Workplace?
Soft skills training can add real value to your business and its operations, and the positive effects can filter through many areas of your daily operations. The following are just some examples of the benefits of soft skills training:
- Improved Communication
Soft skills training can help employees to improve their communication skills, from presentations and sales pitches to active listening and customer relations. Your team will learn to speak more clearly or succinctly, to adapt their tone and vocabulary to different audiences, or to orally scaffold their ideas to improve understanding and collaboration.
- Enhanced Teamwork
Effective and considerate teamwork is critical in modern business for colleagues to work efficiently on shared outcomes. Soft skills training can improve collaboration, contributions, and conflict resolution, helping raise overall team cohesion and productivity.
- Effective Leadership
The best leaders possess a wide-ranging portfolio of personal qualities and skills, so aspiring managers, supervisors, and co-ordinators should be supported at each stage of their career journey through soft skills leadership training. This can help them to improve how they lead by example, empathise with their line reports, inspire others, or manage performance issues, and can have a powerful effect on their fellow employees as whole.
- Problem-solving
Training in soft skills can help colleagues to identify emerging problems, take the initiative with confidence and effectiveness, think outside the box to devise realistic solutions to novel challenges, and make decisions to achieve a swift resolution. Flexible thinking will enable staff to consider each problem as a resolvable challenge and to identify the merits of each potential solution so that they can make better decisions.
How Do You Provide Soft Skills Training?
To get the most from your team’s soft skills, it’s best to employ the services of an expert training specialist, such as Kingdom. We offer programmes of soft skills training that promote creative thinking, innovation, and problem solving, to:
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Develop collaboration and communication.
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Train future business leaders.
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Enhance customer service.
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Improve the confidence of your team.
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Increase employee retention.
Contact Us To Find Out More
To find out more about our services, please call Kingdom Academy on 0330 022 9422 or send us a message today.
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