🚀Entering Tech #014: Five soft skills for 2023

For today’s trivia, we’ll focus on people who have said insightful things about soft skills. Answers are at the bottom of this newsletter. 

We’ve written about soft skills before, and why they’re important. They are transferable personal skills like communication and teamwork that help you excel at work. 

In this edition of #EnteringTech🚀, we spoke to five HR professionals who shared what kind of soft skills are important if you want to succeed in the tech space.

As we go into 2023, there are soft skills more techies have to learn if they want to succeed. Tech companies are tightening their hiring budgets next year and if you want to get into tech, you need to be as prepared as possible.

📈 Adaptability: Newbies in tech must be comfortable with change. People who started their careers in technology 20 or 30 years ago are definitely doing things vastly differently from how they were taught. That’s the nature of technology and failing to adapt will make you redundant.

This requires open-mindedness and resilience, a keyword we will see echoed across the top skills in 2023.

📝 Continuous learning: The ability to research, analyse, and implement is crucial. Intending techies should prioritise research and problem-solving in 2023. 

Evolution in technology is lightning fast. Programmes and platforms being developed today are leaps and bounds ahead of legacy systems less than ten years old. Just look at how much phones have evolved in the past ten years.

But it’s not just technology that changes; clients and workplaces change. 

2023 will demand that all techies are comfortable with ongoing research and continuous learning as this will give them the tools to build the resilience they need to adapt and adjust to inevitable change.

🧠 Critical thinking: In 2023, those who want to grow and succeed must be able to think critically.

This involves looking at existing data and making wise decisions. The steps to critical thinking are: identifying the problem, gathering data, analysing and evaluating, identifying assumptions, establishing significance, making a decision, and communicating.

Good critical thinkers also ask simple questions, challenge common assumptions, are aware of their biases, and read more.

⌚️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.

😇 Ethical awareness: No one wants to work with someone who’s willing to burn everything and anyone for success. This is where ethical awareness comes into play.

It’s all about making the right decisions when faced with a dilemma. When you discover a mistake you made that could cost the business money, do you own up to it quickly and provide solutions or try to cover it up?

As a soft skill, ethical awareness is about making good decisions—and it’s not always easy. It is based on the standards of every workplace and making decisions that comply with those standards.