Hard skills and soft skills – what skills a programmer needs
Hard skills and soft skills help to understand in advance what to expect from a future employee, and also affect your future tasks, probationary period, salary and relationships with colleagues. Also, “hard” and “flexible” skills determine how soon the employer will pay attention to your resume, whether it will call you for an interview and whether it will give you a job. We will tell you what hard skills and soft skills are.
What are hard skills?
Hard skills are skills that are acquired at school and university, in courses, in the workplace, and so on. Often they are checked before the interview using test items.
Each specialty has its own “hard” skills. For example, an architect must know how to use software for building layouts, an accountant must work with 1C, and a translator must speak a foreign language and know the features of literary or technical translation.
As a rule, “hard” skills are the basic requirements for an employee. The employer uses them to determine how you will cope with your job responsibilities. Often, recruiters are looking for candidates for hard skills positions using skill names as keywords in searches. Open vacancies and see what requirements for candidates are repeated in them most often, and which ones are in the first place – most likely, they are important for the employer. You should pay attention to them and include them in the “skills” and “experience” sections.
What are soft skills?
Soft skills determine the level of emotional intelligence, responsibility, the ability to communicate with people and work in a team – in general, they characterize an employee as a person.
Agile skills are harder to assess through a resume. Typically, a recruiter or employer looks at a potential employee’s soft skill during a face-to-face conversation. It plays a role in whether you came for an interview on time, how nervous you are, how you communicate and answer questions.
Incidentally, a LinkedIn study found that 57% of employers rate flexible skills over hard skills.
