If in the past a condition of personal and professional success was represented only by skills aimed at verbal and logical-mathematical intelligence, now this success is conditioned by other skills such as social or emotional intelligence.
Today, in order to get a job in IT, not only technical but also social skills are important. In recent years, recruitment specialists are paying more and more attention to skills such as effective communication or teamwork, because they want to attract people to their companies who integrate perfectly into teams whose members work on joint projects. The lack of these social skills can even lead to the elimination from the race for a job in a company, even if the person has superior technical knowledge.
What exactly are soft skills?
Social skills have gained importance in recent years as they guarantee efficiency in interpersonal relationships, communication, conflict resolution, decision making and more.
We managed to make a portrait of a candidate, who in addition to technical skills must have 5 social skills, which we consider important:
- Teamwork
If you are or want to become a programmer, you should know that it will be very rare, if not non-existent, the cases in which you will work alone. Usually, to create a mobile application or a website, you need to be in constant contact with other programmers, people in the marketing department or graphic designers. That's why you will need to know how to work in a team, how to adapt to changes, meet your deadlines and understand the impact of delays on the entire development process.
- Effective communication
Teamwork cannot exist without effective communication, so you have to learn to ask questions, to find out what is wanted from you, to understand the difference between the requirements related to the business side and those related to the technical part of an application, so that the product you offer is in line with expectations.
- Ability to learn quickly
A good programmer knows his limits, he knows that time passes, and technology changes every second. Now, in the age of digitalization, we have access to the Internet, whenever we can read about the latest news in our subdomain. If you like to be up to date with innovations and enjoy documenting yourself, you have chosen the right job. When you document yourself, you automatically learn faster, know the basics, and most likely you automatically need less time to understand what it is about.
- Creativity
It is the second element that begins with the letter "C" in the life of a programmer. In the first place is "coffee". Then, creativity, being necessary either in solving some bugs or other challenges never encountered before by the programmer. You may have heard from other sources that the TOTB - Thinking Outside the Box applies to programming, which means thinking outside the box, leaving aside the usual way to find solutions and searching in unexplored realms. This is where the great ideas you can have as a programmer come from.
- Time management
Much of the success of an IT project is due to very well developed time management by all team members. It is important to work efficiently and focused on a task, then you need a break, in which you completely disconnect from the computer, followed again by productivity and concentration. You may be wondering if you can actually work on multitasking… Yes, you can, but only in the short term, thus assimilating much more energy. If you do not pay maximum attention to one thing, it will certainly take you longer to finish and you will be more likely to make mistakes.
To get a job in IT, social skills are as important as technical ones, so we encourage you to develop healthy habits and skills!
