🚀EnteringTech #006: Five soft skills you need to learn

Some trivia before we begin. Answers are at the bottom of this newsletter. 

This week, we want to talk about the soft life side of tech: soft skills. 

While hard skills are technical skills that teach you how to do your job, soft skills are transferable personal skills that help you excel at work.

Soft skills are interpersonal skills you develop over time; and unlike hard skills that you learn in university, soft skills are learned through interaction with peers and team members.

Soft skills include communication, integrity, discipline, time management, loyalty, curiosity, trustworthiness and a bunch of other stuff.

If you want to enter into tech and succeed at every step of the way, you need soft skills just as much as you need hard skills.

Learning how to code will get you a job as a software engineer, but communicating efficiently and learning how to manage your time effectively will make you a valuable team player.

Solisten up, there are many soft skills out there, over 20 in fact. But because we like y ‘all, we’ve spoken to several people to find out the top 5 soft skills you’ll need if you want to suceed in tech. They are:

🗣️Communication: You already talk every day, why not make it work for you?

Effective communication is knowing when, where, and how to talk to your coworkers—or anyone really.

Communication can be verbal: listening, writing, talking and presenting; and nonverbal: facial expressions and body language. Nobody wants to work with someone with a stony face and a look of disgust permanently etched. 

By learning how to communicate effectively, people learn about your strengths and see how you add value to the team.

🤝🏾 Collaboration or Teamwork: If you want to go far, you have to go with people. 

We live in the digital age and remote work is becoming more popular. Knowing how to work in collaborative environments is an unspoken requirement in most startups.

Collaboration and communication are twins because you cannot do one well without relying on the other.

Collaboration helps you solve problems quickly because you’re sharing them with your team, and pulling in stakeholders. You’re not hiding failures, hoarding the limelight, or laying blame. You’re working together with others to find the best solutions.

Everyone loves helpful people, and collaborating is a sure-fire way of getting things done and getting to the top.

🌱 Growth mindset: And no, we’re not talking about job hopping.

Everything changes quickly, especially in tech. There are new updates to tools, apps and businesses being released every other day. If you want to survive, you have to have a growth mindset.

Here’s what that means: you need to be able to change and adapt quickly.

During COVID, companies around the world had to shut down their physical offices and move entire teams to virtual workstations; this change forced many employees had to adapt quickly.

This also means the ability or willingness to learn and develop new skills, hard or soft. A growth mindset comes with knowing that you’ll always need to learn new things if you want to be good at what you do.

⌚️Time management: Please, there’s no “African time” in tech. To succeed, you always have to be on time with most things like deadlines and meetings.

Time management is critical for the team, but also for you. Developing time management skills and knowing how to balance your time will help you get better at executing tasks at work.

If you don’t plan and spend your time well, your co-workers might get the impression that you are falling behind on your work 🙁 or it’ll give your colleagues the impression that you’re not serious.

If you can’t meet a deadline or a meeting, communicate the changes to people and let them know.

🔎 Curiosity and discipline: Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.

The biggest names in tech are there because they were curious enough to find out the problems people had, and solve them with tech.

If there’s a skill that’s critical to the growth of tech innovation on the continent, it’s curiosity; or knowing how to ask the right questions in any room.

Curiosity doesn’t just mean asking though; it means digging deep enough to find the answers and if you’re curious enough to find answers to questions, then you’ll be a valuable asset to any team.