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In today’s competitive job market, mastering the right soft skills isn’t just an advantage—it’s a game-changer for career growth and success.
While technical skills are essential, did you know employers value more and more soft skills that enhance workplace dynamics and productivity?
In this article, we’ll explore the top soft skills for 2024 and share tips on how to highlight them effectively on your CV.
So, let’s get comfortable and explore:
Soft skills, often called “people skills” or “interpersonal skills”, are attributes that shape how we work with others, covering areas like (but aren’t limited to) social, emotional, and communication skills. These versatile “qualities” enhance our ability to collaborate, solve problems, and build positive relationships in any setting.
These skills are less about what you do and more about how you do it.
After years of study, our Rising Up experts decided to give a new definition to soft skills: they are neither soft, nor transversal and even less “non-technical”. Core skills are core abilities rooted in both genetic predispositions and lifelong learning, developed through education, professional experiences, and personal growth. These skills encompass cognitive and interpersonal capacities that are strengthened continuously in diverse contexts.
We define them by three criteria, soft (core) skills should be:
Due to the evolving nature of work environments—shaped by remote work, digital communication, and the rise of AI technologies like GPT—core skills are becoming more important than ever for the 2024 job market.
According to a LinkedIn study, 92% of HR professionals and business leaders consider soft skills as important, if not more so, than technical skills. Moreover, a McKinsey survey found that companies prioritizing soft skills are 35% more likely to outperform their competitors. Additionally, 91% of managers are prepared to recruit an employee primarily based on their soft skills.
That’s why it won’t be a surprise to know that employers look for candidates who can navigate change, work collaboratively in diverse teams, and contribute to a positive company culture.
As AI continues to advance and take on more technical tasks, soft skills will become even more critical in the workplace. Skills like emotional intelligence, creativity, adaptability, and effective communication will set individuals apart, allowing them to work seamlessly with both human and AI collaborators.
In an increasingly automated world, these uniquely human qualities will drive innovation, foster collaboration, and ensure that technology serves people effectively. Developing strong soft skills will be essential for navigating the future job landscape and thriving alongside AI.
Hard and soft (or core) skills are often seen as opposites, but in reality, they’re highly complementary. Hard skills—like technical expertise or subject-specific knowledge—are typically learned through formal education and measured by specific standards. In contrast, soft (core) skills, such as public speaking, empathy, and logical reasoning, develop through diverse experiences over time.
Both are important, hard skills provide the technical foundation for a role, while soft core skills often determine how effectively hard skills are applied in real-world scenarios. But they also determine how well a person integrates and collaborates with others. After all, a programmer not only needs to master code languages, but also needs to know how to communicate effectively and work as part of a team.
These are highly complementary skills, as one cannot exist without the other.
That’s why recognizing their differences in learning and measurement is essential to understanding their unique, yet interrelated, value.
While hard skills can easily be measured and quantified, soft (core) skills - have long remained a more elusive subject. Though the term “soft skills” emerged in the mid-20th century, it wasn’t until the 21st century—with advancements in cognitive science—that we began to truly understand the foundations and mechanisms of these skills. This deeper understanding has led our experts to refine the concept, now known as "core skills," to emphasize their essential role.
With the right tool, it’s now possible to identify, develop, and master these core skills, empowering individuals to better prepare for the demands of today’s job market.
When it comes to hiring, employers often look for a combination of technical expertise and strong core skills that enhance workplace performance and collaboration.
Using the latest research and data, we identified the top 10 soft skills most frequently highlighted as essential for 2024 resumes. To provide maximum clarity and impact, we then mapped these skills to our comprehensive competency framework. By aligning these key abilities with precise definitions, our experts ensure that your core skills are presented in the most accurate and effective way, avoiding vague or overly broad terms.
Effective and clear communication is essential for success in team-based environments (1).
For us, at Rising Up, we prefer to divide the term into 3 core skills: Public speaking - the ability to share information in a clear, appropriate and effective manner; Synthetic Reasoning - it’s about creating meaning and coherence from complexity; Influence - the ability to impact the beliefs or behaviors of others.
Cross-functional collaboration is highly sought after, especially in dynamic workplaces (2).
Since this term is often wide, we can divide into more specific ones: Pay attention to others - ability to actively search for information, to understand what a speaker is saying and to be willing to listen when the other person is talking; Provide positive feedback - the ability to appreciate and recognize the work and skills of the people you work with; and Assertiveness - the capacity to assert oneself with appropriate authority to communicate intentions and defend rights and opinions without disregarding those of others.
The ability to quickly respond and adapt to unexpected circumstances and adjust priority accordingly is crucial in today's fast-paced job market (3).
Instead of adaptability, two more precise terms would be reactiveness - the ability to quickly respond to unexpected situations or requests and adjust priorities accordingly; and mental flexibility - ability to move from one subject to another, to take the other's
perspective or to consider a subject from different angles.
Analytical thinking and complex problem-solving are in high demand. Employers seek candidates who can navigate from one subject to another and find effective solutions (4).
Here, we bring more specific terms: Intuitive reasoning - ability to recognize and understand a situation quickly due to previous experience; Logical reasoning - the skill to make connections between events and draw statistical patterns from them; and Emotional control - ability to trigger, inhibit, maintain and adjust emotions.
Understanding and managing emotions, both your own and others', is key to effective leadership and teamwork.
Alternately, a better fit would be Emotional control - ability to trigger, inhibit, maintain and adjust emotions; and Empathy - ability to deduce the mental state, mood, needs and feelings of others.
Creativity drives innovation and is essential for problem-solving and adapting to new challenges (5).
The term can lead to those core skills: Curiosity - Ability to interest in a wide variety of fields; Divergent reasoning - Ability to generate new ideas or solutions; and Perseverance - the ability to keep going towards a goal, even when faced with obstacles.
Leadership skills are vital for guiding teams and projects to success. For that reason, more appropriate terms would be: Proactive - the ability to perform tasks spontaneously, even when not required to do so; Positivity - Ability to analyze and leverage the positive aspects of a situation; and Risk Appetite - the ability to assess, understand, and embrace calculated risks in a constructive and informed manner.
Efficiently managing time and prioritizing tasks is critical in any profession (6). Employers value candidates who can meet deadlines and handle multiple responsibilities.
As an alternative to time management, better terms would be: Efficiency - the ability to produce maximum results with minimum time and energy input; Planning - ability to plan tasks to be completed in time and to meet deadlines; Multitasking - ability to manage and prioritize multiple tasks under time pressure; and Autonomy - ability to perform tasks with little or no supervision.
Here we can use 4 core skills that relate to conflict resolution: Openness - ability to be receptive to and embrace new ideas, experiences and approaches; Paying attention to others - ability to actively search for information, to understand what a speaker is saying and to be willing to listen when the other person is talking; Monitoring - ability to monitor, modify and improve strategies; and Emotional control - ability to trigger, inhibit, maintain and adjust emotions.
Related to thriving in new digital workplaces, we can associate it with: Curiosity - ability to interest in a wide variety of fields; Multitasking : Ability to manage and prioritize multiple tasks and Divergent reasoning - ability to generate new ideas or solutions.
So, what sets you apart in the 2024 job market? Beyond technical prowess, it's your soft (core) skills that can significantly enhance your career prospects.
This article is just the beginning to stand out your potential, it’s time to actively identify and improve your soft (core) skills with a soft skill training program.
Continuously developing and showcasing your soft (core) skills is key to thriving in today’s competitive job market. Investing in these skills not only boosts your employability but also contributes to a positive and trusting corporate culture.
At Rising Up, we developed a soft skills training challenge, to evaluate,help students and employees to develop the crucial core skills. More important, it allows the individuals to identify their strengths and areas for improvement, based on their career field.
Send us a message 📩 to hello@risinguparis.com and we'll organize a 15-minute demo for you within a week.
Combler le manque de connaissance en soft skills de vos étudiants 2 fois plus rapidement.
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