Hard and soft skills play a vital role in your career growth and trajectory. How can L&D support skill development and what actually is the difference between hard and soft skills?
Skills, and their relation to job performance, are sometimes overlooked from an L&D perspective.
When you have Totara Perform in play, it’s easier to tie performance goals to your learning content.
Related: How to link learning to development
But what even are hard and soft skills?
Is the difference between them important? And how can you develop both to turn new hires into high flyers?
In this blog, we’ll go through:
- What hard skills are
- What soft skills are
- The difference between hard skills and soft skills
- How to develop hard and soft skills in your organisation
Let’s get stuck in.
What are hard skills?
Hard skills, sometimes referred to as technical skills, are job-specific.
They tend to be built through education or training and are relevant to a job position or seniority level.
For example, an accountant will need hard skills around budget management while a developer will need coding skills.
However, the level of budget management skill will be dependent on the seniority of the accountant and so won’t be expected of a junior or entry-level accountant.
Hard skills are measurable and can be described using numerical or yes/no criteria for example, “she has 5 years of experience in CRM management.”
What are some examples of hard skills?
Technical skills describe what you know how to do. They aren’t just limited to tasks, they can be specific to tools too.
Some examples of hard skills include:
- Computer programming languages
- Bookkeeping
- Engineering
- Speaking a foreign language
- Web development
- Writing
- Microsoft Office skills
What are soft skills?
Soft skills, sometimes referred to as workplace skills, are characteristics, usually more relevant to personalities or how people work and socialise.
Some soft skills might be something an organisation looks for in order to build a team that values the same things, whereas others will be more specific to successful employees in a specific role.
For example, creativity is really important for marketers but less important for those working in finance.
What are some examples of soft skills?
Workplace skills describe your approach to or attributes of your work.
Some examples of soft skills include:
- Adaptability
- Creativity
- Collaboration
- Critical thinking
- Leadership
- Empathy
- Problem-solving
- Teamwork
How to evaluate hard and soft skills
You can usually spot and evaluate hard skills through resumes, job-related assignments or role-specific interview questions. Remember, completing a knowledge gap analysis is key to ensuring you know what skills you’re looking for, and which you are missing in your employees.
For soft skills, you’ll need to look at behavioural or situational questions, or use soft skills tests to identify personality characteristics.
What’s the difference between hard skills and soft skills?
Generally speaking, hard skills are useful for helping you identify candidates or employees who are good on paper, whether they’re potential new hires or looking to progress to a management position or general promotion.
Meanwhile, soft skills indicate who is ‘good’ in person, too.
For example, let’s imagine you’re hiring an L&D professional to join your team.
Some hard skills that might be essential for the role could be:
- Knowledge of using an LMS
- Instructional content design
- Data analytics
Meanwhile, their soft skills, or workplace skills could be:
- Teamwork
- Communication skills
- Project management
Are hard skills or soft skills more important?
Each type of skill plays its role, just as each individual skills does.
But while hard skills are vital to being offered an interview or promotion, it is the workplace skills that will help secure it.
In fact, nearly all of the top 10 most valuable skills for the 2030 market in the US and the UK are workplace skills, according to Pearson and Nester
And, an estimated 87% of employers struggled to fill positions due to a lack of workplace skills.
So, what’s the solution?
Well, this is where L&D come in.
How L&D can encourage hard skill and soft skill growth
As you’ve seen, there’s no use in just developing hard skills.
In fact, for current employees, it’s highly worth investing in soft skills to improve team efficiency and productivity.
But both are worth investing in.
So, how can your L&D team encourage hard and soft skills to develop across employees?
How to develop hard skills in the workplace
Developing hard skills is really useful for your team for several reasons. You might need to introduce a new tool and want your team to be upskilled on it to reduce the learning curve so they can get started quickly.
Or, you might want to increase exposure to other technical skills to speed up processes or improve performance.
Here are 3 easy ways to develop hard skills in your employees:
- Training programmes
Whether it’s face to face learning from accredited sources, or online training on your LMS, training programmes are a classic way to develop hard skills.
Look for courses that offer certification so that employees can prove their accreditation too. - On-the-job learning
Some people learn best by doing. On-the-job learning does just that. Let employees learn and practice in real-time to challenge the development of their hard skills and get working experience of their training. - Mentoring and coaching
Pair your employees with seasoned experts in your chosen hard skill to share advice, offer training opportunities and provide their expertise.
💡 Pro Tip
BuildEmpire can offer you a range of tools and features to support the development of hard skills. Create learning content across a range of needs with ease in our simple Totara interface.
Book a demo to see our LMS
How to develop soft skills in the workplace
Developing soft skills may feel like an impossible task, but in actuality, it’s quite simple once you’ve identified what skills you want to encourage.
Some methods to consider when developing soft skills are
- Team-building activities
The classic, but it works. If you want to encourage teamwork, communication and problem-solving, then team-building is a great option. - 360 feedback
Getting feedback from your peers is a great way to identify where you excel and what areas you need to improve. But it’s a brilliant tool to reflect on soft skills in particular. - Mentoring and coaching
Yep that’s right, mentoring makes it for both hard and soft skills.
If you have an employee looking to develop their career, you might pair them with a leader in the space and get them to look at their differences and similarities. The mentor’s experiences, values and expertise can be used to transfer soft skills to their mentee.
Using an LMS to improve hard and soft skills
While you have the tactics you need to develop hard and soft skills, where are you mapping and tracking this process?
A learning management system is a vital piece of software when it comes to addressing the skills gap and creating meaningful L&D processes.
Many learning platforms wouldn’t be able to keep up with complex relationships across your organisation, or allow you to simplify key processes to spend more time on creating content.
Luckily, that’s where we come in.
Our version of Totara, known as The Edition, takes all the great features that Totara offers, and amplifies them. We have created a truly user-centric learning platform with limitless customisation opportunities.
Book a demo of BuildEmpire to see the platform in action.