Soft skills are highly sorted after in every profession. Whether you are a cleaner or a very “big” CEO in a company, your soft skills will be a decider of your success. Several soft skills are very important in any endeavor. These include:
- Communication
- Teamwork
- Leadership
- Problem Solving
- Design Thinking
- Etc.
Soft skills are the character traits, attitudes, and mindsets, people relationships, leadership, communication skills that are sort after in any business or organization. These soft skills coupled with relevant hard skills help sell individuals beyond just their competence.
Businesses prefer to employ individuals who show excellence with their hard skills but more importantly are easier to work with. Lacking good communication and teamwork skills means you cannot work with people no matter how good the individual may be.
It is said that your hard skills can get you a job but your attitude can make you lose it. Have you ever realized that there are people with very good skills but possess very horrible and off attitudes?
LET US TALK ABOUT TEAMWORK?
It is becoming increasingly important for individuals to work in teams and groups. It is not enough for one to be very excellent or competent in an area but couple it with great team working skills/ability.
In today’s digital working environment, the so-called digital skills have their core and secondary skills that it offers. With how the future of work is changing rapidly, it is now of great concern for people to learn to work together in arriving at success.
DOES OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM HELP BUILD THE TEAMWORK ABILITIES OF STUDENTS?
In our institutions today, right from our basic to secondary level, students are encouraged to learn as individuals, study as individuals, write tests and exams as individuals, pass as individuals and fight to become the best in their class.
Spending about 6 years from Junior High School to Senior High School working as an individual is enough to make anyone selfish at wanting to achieve success alone and be seen as the best and the greatest mind.
In our education system today, students are not assessed based on their ability to work together in teams or groups. Looking at how students qualify to enter into Senior High and other higher institutions of education, team working is more of a personal decision where students gather to learn and discuss topics that possibly will come in their examinations.
Many students will attest to the fact that putting them together to work in groups comes with lots of challenges as you mostly find either one or two people in the group doing all the work for the others. Groups struggle with communications skills, the ego of individuals, lack of synergy, and inability to combine thoughts and achieve a common goal.
Looking at our tertiary institutions, thousands of students complete every year with powerful and innovative projects only to sit back home after graduating, waiting for someone to employ them to do what they could do for themselves.
In a broader sense, inter-departmental projects could be organized to help young people access the competence of other students from different relevant departments to work on projects that can get commercialized even after school.
Assuming an Electrical Engineering student teams up with Material Engineering, Accounting, Marketing, and Management students on one project, it is obvious they can put their skills, knowledge, and expertise together in producing projects that can serve the real market upon their completion of school.
This is just to say that, teamwork is, therefore a very vital skill for young people to possess in today’s world, a needed ability to survive in this rapidly changing world of people.
