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Every career or job requires special skills needed to carry out responsibilities in such place of work, however, some skills are not specific to one particular career path but are useful across all employment sectors.

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Interestingly, most employers are often looking for such skills that go beyond one’s qualifications and experience. These skills are known as Employability skills or ‘soft skills’, and they are the building blocks of your career. These skills, however, may not be job-specific, but they play an important role in improving your performance and value in the workplace, and they can also have an impact on your ability to progress in your career.

Employability skills are also often referred to as employment skills, soft skills, work-readiness skills or foundational skills. These are skills that help to improve your performance, minimize errors and promote collaboration with your coworkers, enabling you to perform your role and carry out your duties more effectively.

These soft skills are what make you employable because most employers are willing to teach someone the job-specific skills required, such as how to operate machines used in the company or how to run various computer packages for the company.

However, beyond this, they usually want to see that you already have the other ‘soft skills’ before hiring, because they are much harder to teach.

Therefore having a basic knowledge of these skills and learning them would keep you ahead of others.

Some of these soft skills include:

1. Communication skills

Communication is one of the most important employability skills, because it is an essential part of almost every job. Without communication, it would be almost impossible to pass important messages across various platforms.

Communication skills are highly required to transmit or receive messages accurately to and from other people by speaking or in writing, without misunderstandings. Excellent communication skills make you more employable, because they can enhance a company’s productivity and efficiency and help prevent the waste of valuable time and resources.

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However, Communication skills are further divided into three sectors which include:

Verbal Communication: This involves the use of words, either orally or in written form. As an employee, you must know how to use the right words properly at all times, because some jobs might rely heavily on the written form, while others might consistently use the oral form of communication.
Non-Verbal Communication: This refers to communication without words, for example through body language, tone of voice, or even emojis. As earlier stated, every job or career requires a form of communication.
Listening: This is a very important skill in most careers, it involves how we take in and then interpret the verbal and non-verbal messages sent by others, including in writing.

2. Problem-solving

This has to do with identifying and understanding vital issues and their consequences, and determining the most effective solutions.

Problem-solving skills could set you apart from others because they are skills needed to maintain an efficient operational process and achieve objectives more effectively in an organization. This means that if you are a good problem-solver, you can play an important role in any organization because you can identify issues, break them down and think of solutions.

3. Teamwork

This is another important employability skill needed, because it has to do with your ability to work harmoniously with your colleagues to achieve a shared goal. Teamwork skills can increase your hiring chances because you may be able to help a company reach its goals more effectively by collaborating with certain individuals.

However, this skill requires your ability to be comfortable working and collaborating with people, take responsibility for your share of work, and contribute to team goals.

In conclusion, there is, inevitably, a wide range of skills that could be useful to both employers and the organization at large. This is why it is important to recognize and use your skills appropriately. An open mind, and a willingness to embrace new ideas, are probably some of the most useful attributes that you can bring to any organization.

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This article was first published on 16th March 2022

grace-christos

Grace Christos Is a content creator with a proven track record of success in content marketing, online reputation management, sales strategy, and so much more.