Enhancing your soft skills

What are soft skills?

Soft skills usually refer to the personal traits that help you:

• get along with others 
• succeed in the workplace.

Soft skills are different to the specific skills and experience needed in order to do your job. They tend to be transferable, which means they can be applied to any job.

The importance of soft skills in the workplace is starting to be more widely recognised by employers, as they generally relate to:

• adaptability and resilience
• teamwork and collaboration
• creativity and innovation
• critical thinking, negotiating and problem solving
• time management and project planning
• communication and networking.

How to improve your soft skills

Soft skills are not fixed. You can:

• improve these skills with practice and training
• learn new skills 
• adapt these skills as your life experience changes.

it can be a good time to reassess your soft skills if you’ve taken time off to care for a child. Think about if:

• any of your existing skills have changed or improved during this time
• you’ve developed new soft skills as a result of caring for your child that can be applied to the workplace
• if there any soft skills that you’d like to focus on and improve.

If want to strengthen your soft skills, check if you can access online training through your job. Many workplaces offer these types of courses to staff for free.

You can also search for a course online at:

• Course Finder
• Open Universities Australia.