Introduction to Soft Skills

Welcome everyone to the course on Soft Skills. This lecture aims to provide an introduction to soft skills. Soft skills is a phrase often heard from relatives, friends, and others. Therefore, it is not a new phrase. However, hearing it is not enough. You might often wonder what soft skills actually are. You may have heard the word 'skills', but when 'soft' is added, it makes each of you more curious. The other day, your father returned from the bank and said, "Oh! The new manager has very good soft skills." At that time, you might have wondered what soft skills are. Not only did you think to yourself, but the next morning you might have asked your father if he was very handsome and if he would get a high salary. At that time, you decided to go to the bank and find out what the manager was like. When you reached there, you realized that the manager was a very short man and not very handsome. But then you understood that people valued his abilities. Suddenly, you started thinking that people have certain skills. For example, a carpenter might have carpentry skills, a doctor might have medicinal skills, a teacher might have teaching skills, and so on. Whether it's a driver or a lawyer, everyone will have certain skills or abilities in some profession, but you might want to know more about what soft skills actually are, and if they are some special skills. Soft skills are actually a buzzword worldwide. Before defining soft skills, it is always good to understand what soft skills are and how best to learn about their characteristics. To help you understand what soft skills are, I will give you an example. Once, I was invited to a wedding ceremony with very little prior notice, but it was essential to attend the wedding. Moreover, by the end of the month, I didn't have much money. I felt guilty and ashamed about how to give a suitable gift to the wedding couple. I went into a nearby shop, where I saw many expensive items as gifts. I was really upset. I was not in a state to decide what to buy. Suddenly, the young manager of the shop intervened and asked me, "May I help you?" The young man's intervention greatly impressed me, and then he showed me one gift item after another, telling me their prices and significance. According to the requirements of the function, I bought a gift item from him, and I was very happy with his intervention. I was very impressed by the young man's behavior. I asked him how much he had studied, and his answer made me think a lot, "I had to drop out in the final year of college due to financial difficulties." Above all, that young man impressed me and motivated me to buy a gift from him. In reality, the reason for that was his personal skills. But his helpful attitude made me think a lot, made me analyze my needs, and made me understand the importance of handling things. Truly, there is a lot to say about the skills he possessed. All of this can be collectively called soft skills. It is important to note that many of us often think that soft skills are communication skills. But communication skills were only part of the solution, because the other salesmen who showed me the items also spoke, but they did not have the same charisma, which the young manager had in abundance. His consistent effort, his friendly and trustworthy interaction, all of it made me feel that he was the person from whom I should buy. You can see many such situations where soft skills seem very important. Perhaps, you now understand what your father meant about the manager's soft skills. Therefore, soft skills are various skills that come under one umbrella. Now, another doubt that arises in your mind is that when you use the term soft skills, you will remember hardware and software, because you are living in the digital age. Are soft skills and hard skills the same? It is very important to understand the difference between the two. Soft skills are the perfection of one's hard skills. What are hard skills is another question now. Let me give another example. Imagine you have two doctors with clinics on the same road in your town. From their prescriptions, you understand that both have very good degrees and excellent qualifications. Both have foreign degrees. But what surprises you is that one doctor's clinic is always crowded, while the other doctor's clinic is not crowded at all. Both studied from the same college and were first in their batches. But what actually happened in their cases? The second person had better training, while the first person did not. Here again, you might have a question whether this is due to a lack of soft skills. Because if you examine the dealings of the two doctors, you will understand that there is a big difference in the way they talk to clients, the way they talk to patients, and the way their staff members behave. In reality, if you look at the two pictures shown here, you will understand. In the picture of analyzing the patient, the patient explains his case to the doctor, saying he has pain in his neck, legs, and back, and feels weak. The doctor, after a few moments, tells the patient that he has hypochondria, and the patient, looking at the doctor's face, cannot understand what hypochondria is and thinks it is some fatal disease. Now, what you understand here is that this doctor cannot understand the patient's limitations and used a very difficult word to the patient. On the other hand, another case is shown where the attendant talks to the patient. "The doctor will call you now, I cannot promise that the doctor will talk to you, but he will see you now." There are two situations here. You will understand that you often want to go to a doctor who knows your medical history. You will always find a solution in a place where the diagnosis is actually known, but the doctor prescribes very little medicine, and the staff is very friendly. This now indicates the importance of soft skills. You will understand further that this is not just about life. Because, when you study for a degree in college or university, you often think of nothing but your CGPA or percentage. Once you get your CGPA and percentage, either campus placements happen, or when you look for a job, you might get a small package, but you might realize that your friend has a better package. Why did that happen? Dear friends, this is again based on your soft skills. Soft skills can help you get out of difficult situations. You might have noticed the two situations I described earlier. One, when I was looking to buy a gift, I couldn't decide without the help of the shop manager. Now, let's look at another example here. How two people interact with each other. Again, the need for soft skills arises. Soft skills ensure firmness and reliability. You will understand that soft skills are a set of skills. Now, some people say there are a lot of soft skills, or if you are asked to tell how many skills are needed in short, it is very difficult. Often, what is thought is how many soft skills a person needs. Some people say there are 28 skills, while others say there are 60 skills, but some people think there are only 10 skills. Many answers for soft skills overlap in one way or another. Now, after analyzing soft skills, we can also create a working definition for soft skills; personality traits, social attractiveness, simple language, personal habits, friendly, and optimistic outlook that marks people at different levels are characteristics of soft skills. Dear friends! There was a time when you would study a course and become eligible for a job, and then you might have worked alone, but now we are living in a time when you cannot work alone. Now, you cannot work only by using machines. In reality, we are living in an era where we have to work through situations that cannot be handled by machines alone, and where we have to interact with people. On the contrary, it will be helpful only if there is an organized structure of language, politeness, behavior, conversational strategies, and some other additional intelligence. Therefore, we can say that the working method of skills is expertise. When talking about behavioral skills, we actually need to understand what these behavioral skills are. Are these behavioral skills inherent in us? Or do we need to learn them? Because today we are going to live in a world where we have to interact with people of different temperaments, different tastes, different backgrounds, different cultures, and different characteristics. Once you get a job, what is important is to climb the ladder of success in a short time. You cannot do that until you learn some personal attractiveness. What is this attractiveness? First of all, self-awareness. How self-aware are you about the world's current needs? If you check the newspapers, especially the instant page of The Times of India, you will find various jobs according to your skills, although often qualification criteria like B.A. are mentioned, and those with M.A., B.Sc., M.Sc., B.Tech., M.Tech., or other additional degrees are also required, but other criteria that actually fall under the soft skills category are not mentioned. It is not surprising that people often say that many graduates and postgraduates today are not employable. It is because they lack the skills that actually make them employable. This is indeed a very dire picture, and you will often see such things appearing in many newspapers with captions and headlines. You need to be aware of the skills that will drive you forward. As I said earlier, soft skills are actually life skills, one's abilities, and ways of behaving. We can keep all these under one umbrella, but as I said earlier, many people have the notion that soft skills mean communication skills. Of course, that is also necessary, but communication skills are only a part of soft skills. Other skills like interpersonal skills, management skills, leadership skills, team dynamics are actually what we need. All these skills cannot be learned in a day. In reality, this is a lifelong learning process. The more people you meet, the more you can get close to them. When handling complex problems, you can interact more with others, and you should understand that you can learn something from it. With soft skills, you get a special impetus to move forward among people. Now, you cannot get a job instantly with soft skills, because when it comes to job questions, it will actually be about hard skills. Let's now look at the difference between hard skills and soft skills. What are hard skills? Hard skills are the subject knowledge and technical skills you acquire during your college or university days. But even though you gain technical expertise when you come out of college or university, what is actually needed is soft skills. Because, due to your nature, you might be an introvert, and then you might not be able to talk much with other people. Naturally, people with soft skills will go to greater heights, while others cannot, even though their hard skills are excellent, but it is your soft skills that make you excellent and shine in your job. Here, if you have self-awareness and self-confidence, they are actually tools that enable you to face others. Then, when you are in a job, during meetings, in some situations, you have to make some decisions. When you are the CEO of a company or in-charge of the company, you will have to prepare some technical documents or make some decisions. Whatever profession you are in, you definitely need some soft skills. Without the help of soft skills, your hard skills will never be recognized. In reality, what you need to do is to take your hard skills through the engine called soft skill. You can also say that these soft skills are performance skills. If we look at some of the examples we discussed earlier, we talked about the young manager who did not have an MBA qualification but had intelligence, because the way he behaved and handled the situation proved to be excellent. We can say that performance skills are soft skills. As I described earlier, hard skills are learned as part of the college curriculum. Soft skills are not taught in any college or university. Now, civil workshops and in-service training programs are organized a lot. All of them are only to make employees more effective in achieving the desired results. Soft skills can be said to be part of continuous learning. It is a continuous learning process. You will always be looking for new knowledge, new skills, and how to achieve them. That is possible only when you are self-aware. When you become self-aware and start learning, confidence will start coming into you. After a certain period, you will start bubbling with confidence. Many young people – they often fail to meet the requirements of recruiters when they appear for interviews and become very disappointed. Some of them become disappointed, and often say they can't do anything. But dear friends, this is not the end of your learning journey. You need to go further, you need to do some personal research, you need to analyze your own achievements yourself, and you need to analyze the answers you gave to the recruiters. About the requirements of recruiters and organizations, you

A famous recruiter, in a way that is understandable, said, "I would prefer to hire a girl with a beautiful smile and excellent communication skills over someone who has a very good CGPA but has done nothing." Now, the clear statement is this: your CGPA alone cannot get you a job; rather, other skills are needed, and these are called soft skills. You might sometimes see news revealing astonishing facts. What are these shocking facts? Look at this data collected from some newspapers. The data emerging from the 2011 census indicates that the unemployment rate is high among the highly qualified. This is actually a report from the renowned Hindu newspaper. It indicates that the unemployment rate is high among the highly qualified. Now, the question is this: if you go to college, you will get a good degree, you will have a very good CGPA, but you will not be job-ready. What is actually your deficiency? You might need some very important skills from the perspective of recruiters. As I said, advertisements in newspapers will give you a picture of recruitment trends. How do you know what a recruiter wants? Now, there is another press release that will hurt you more: 2.3 million people applied for a peon job in UP, including engineers and doctors. When we provide many facilities to aspiring engineers, doctors, and other professionals, this is truly a tragic statistic. At the end of the day, they become unemployable. This is very pathetic, and we need to analyze this situation from the perspective of recruiters. What do recruiters actually want? People with degrees may have degrees, but they may not have the necessary skills. Another survey by Aspiring Mind says that a good percentage of professionals today will not get jobs due to a lack of communication skills. As I said earlier, of course, you may have a good CGPA, but to prove yourself suitable for today's job market, what you need are communication skills, which will help you negotiate and understand what the requirements are. It will help you analyze, it will help you evaluate, and through this, you will be able to find a solution to your problem. For that, you need to go an extra mile; as I said, you need to be smarter, and that's true, but you are not using your intelligence in the right way. How to do that? Now, the government is taking many steps, there are many ways to create employment opportunities, but you need to learn some skills. Nowadays, all soft skills are relevant. You might be seeing that the nature of jobs is changing, whether in our country or any other country. People actually need those who can take initiative and bring innovative ideas. These ideas will come not only from books but also from other sources. You know that there is a discussion between policymakers and employment agencies about how you are made aware and how you understand, and there is a gap between academia and industry. That is why, although most organizations recruit you, they try to provide you with good training to get good results within a few years. You know how to succeed from a personal perspective or from an organizational perspective. What you need to succeed is an excellent employee. An excellent employee means someone who is knowledgeable, confident, skilled in communication, truly capable of participating effectively in discussions, capable of taking the organization forward critically, and capable of rescuing the organization from critical situations. Otherwise, what will happen in today's scenario? Actually, there is a business of rapidly growing colleges, and that might be why graduates and postgraduates are rapidly increasing, but we are failing to provide the skills that industry needs to these graduates and postgraduates. To meet the needs of the industry, soft skills play a major role. Soft skills will make an employee more friendly, more responsible, help them understand their responsibilities, and in some situations, enable them to make decisions. In some dangerous situations, most often your boss will not be there to guide you; at that time, your real skills will be tested, and you will be equipped as a capable, excellent employee based on how you do things, how you make decisions, or how you come out of that crisis. Now, looking at the trend of newspapers and the gap between industry and academia, the former president of NASSCOM, Mr. Kiran Karnik, said, "We need to think about efforts to make qualified students employable in the industry." Employability is a keyword. What actually makes you employable are some of your soft skills; your personal charm will not always work, because when you write a document, you need to blend your personal charm and the way you use words for the excellence of its expression. This is not a world where only written words matter. Unwritten words also have importance, and unwritten words are very difficult to understand; how to understand them can be learned from these lectures. We will discuss why certain key skills are needed in some situations, and in such situations, it can be proven how beneficial not only your words but also your non-verbal expressions are. Today, we do not send messages using only pen and paper, and we do not always send or receive written documents; rather, you must also handle them electronically. Now, electronic writing has some limitations, which we can discuss when we go into the writing section. Similarly, depending on the situation, you need to handle some communication technologies that have other requirements and limitations. The way you speak over telephones sometimes and the way you discuss some business deals are very important. We need to talk to people, and for that, what you really need is the skill to handle language. Draft based on the organizational structure of the documentation, how you present a problem, and considering problem-solving, all these are very important. Nowadays, we need to be more aware of facing new challenges. You cannot write everything down. Actually, when drafting a business document, you need to choose the right words. It should be the same when attending a business meeting. Most often, you see some statements, and actually, you also have meetings after the meeting. Often, you might feel that these meetings are a waste of time, but if you think about the true spirit of the meeting, you will understand that some business deals can be discussed, and we can reach a solution after the meeting. You might have understood how meetings are organized. Actually, this is organized to know the viewpoints of other people, because, as you know, you alone cannot make the best decision; a good decision requires collective agreement, and that can only happen with the convergence of ideas, because you don't know whose ideas will be more effective. On other occasions, there are also group discussions when a company faces a serious problem, and some people are called to discuss the pros and cons of the situation and reach a conclusion. When you go to discuss, sometimes you become self-capable, why? Sometimes, it is due to fear of your boss, or due to ego issues with some of your colleagues, you try to hide your performance. But this is not right. Actually, in a GD or a meeting, you need to understand the perspectives of others, and you also need to present your own perspectives. As the organization grows, your responsibilities increase, and you will find that the way you interact with more people is not the same; it is different. Different people may have different personalities, and since you are at the helm of affairs, you are in the top slot, and you might want to work, you need to understand the shortcomings, and for that, you need to interact with your seniors, juniors, leaders, peers, and others. You need to know specifically about the language you are going to use there. On another occasion, there may be other situations where you have to represent your own organization, where you have to make a mark. But, sometimes what happens is that you may not have a good rapport with your boss; nevertheless, when you go to represent your own organization, you need to enhance the positive image of your organization. For that, you may sometimes have to suppress your anger, you may have to suppress some facts, you have to represent for the proper growth of the organization, which will further improve your organization's image. Dear friends, life is full of challenges, and it is full of many opportunities. Sometimes, due to some obstacles, you might feel a little down; coming out of that requires optimism, which is a component of soft skills, and you must be optimistic, look forward, and always try to learn lessons from past mistakes. The world is now in a state where geographical boundaries are shrinking. Many multinational organizations are opening offices in India and then hiring for jobs abroad. Now, what you need to do in such situations is this: you must be culturally sensitive; what you need to know in today's world is that there are people from various states, various countries, different cultures, different beliefs, and different traditions. But when you are in a particular organization, you also need to respect the feelings of others. For this, what you need to do is to include others more to be more comfortable. When we go into the category of communication skills, we will talk about how to be a good listener and then how to be a good speaker. Because, as I said, this world is going to become a common platform. Someone rightly said that the world is a global village, and as the wings of globalization fly, these cultural biases will have to be eliminated. When working in an organization, you must respect the goals and objectives of the organization, and for that, you must also respect the cultural beliefs of others. When I read a report by the Indian Labor Organization (ILO), I understood that it discusses unemployment in India, and the question now is how to deal with the growth of this unemployment. The statement by the Vice President of the Indian Staffing Federation, Mr. Rituparna Chakraborty, is very important and requires serious attention because he said, "We need to invest in youth and develop their skills." You know that this is something we hear from various quarters. Therefore, what is mandatory in today's situation is to develop skills. That is why the Vice President of the Indian Staffing Federation says that we must develop and invest in inner skills, especially among the youth. Our Prime Minister also repeatedly says in every conversation that youth are the greatest capital, and we must invest in them. Of course, according to Chakraborty, we need to integrate our education system with an effective vocational training administration. If the country's youth are proficient, naturally the country will shine. Today, we need an expert India, and that is why there are initiatives like Skill India. Finally, many people who think that jobs are paramount should understand that there are many initiatives like Start-up India, Make in India, and the most important one I am lecturing on now, NPTEL. The objective behind this program is to create awareness among the youth to empower them to bridge the gap, so that they come forward and create a shining India. My dear friends, practice makes a man perfect. Always try to continue practicing. Once you try to enhance your soft skills, or if you possess soft skills, life will have diverse splendors, life will have diverse opportunities, and success will always be at your doorstep. You don't have to feel disappointed because you didn't get a job; you should always have the optimism that if you didn't get one job, another job is waiting for you. You know what Swami Vivekananda's mantra is: "Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached." Everyone should go with this mantra. Dear friends, when you awaken to your matters, you become self-aware, you gain confidence, and when you do not stop, you become dynamic through soft skills, and thus you are going to achieve the goal you once started. I hope the first lecture and soft skills will create a new awareness that we have a long way to go. Life is a journey, and we must prepare ourselves for the journey through rainy days and sunny days. Thank you very much. We will discuss more about the various aspects of soft skills in the next lecture. Thank you.