How do you learn the “soft” skills that nobody teaches you?
Hard skills get way more recognition than soft skills. “Learn to code” or “study STEM” are almost catch phrases. “Should’ve majored in something useful,” he said sarcastically, clutching his psychology degree from a liberal arts school.
But the farther you go in a career, the less hard skills matter and the more so-called “soft” skills make the difference.
Why “Diamond Pencils?”
A normal pencil is cheap and made of soft graphite, which you can write with.
A diamond pencil is hard and expensive, but it ain’t good for shit.
So where do you go to learn soft skills?
There’s no soft skills major. You learn this stuff on the job — except…look around any office and you see people who are frustrated that no one listens to them, or that their boss sucks, or that they can’t seem to get what they want.
Maybe it’s not so easy to learn.
Yes, some bosses do suck. And nothing can guarantee you get what you want. At the same time, some people seem to consistently get their way. What are they doing differently? What do they know that everyone else doesn’t?
At 24, I was a solo writer at a tech company. I spoke to my boss and another writer, and not many others. By 26 I was director of content marketing at that company, leading an 11 person team.
Along the way, I started to learn about managing teams, working with groups who don’t have to help you, and interacting with other directors and VPs.
I don’t claim to know everything (not even close) but that experience opened my mind to how these people think — and how they got to their positions.
Now I want to write about it. For three reasons, two of them selfish:
You can avoid mistakes by learning from my mistakes
Writing about this will force me to think about it, and soft skills are what will keep moving my career forward
A lot of the advice is about communication. I’d love if everyone communicated with me in these ways, so I’ll write about the things I’d like to see in the workplace.
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If you’d like to check out other projects (my work at ActiveCampaign, past projects about exercise/psychology, ultimate frisbee, or short stories), you can check them out at https://benyaminelias.com/projects
