Hard skills and soft skills: What are they and how to acquire them? at Makenow.

We have seen very important changes recently with the pandemic. Some insecurities, uncertainties, ambiguities and complexities emerged. This "self-knowledge" became necessary. Therefore, it is necessary to constantly reinvent itself over time. And how to do it? Have you heard about hard and soft skills? As the name implies, hard skills are skills that we can measure in some way and are easily recognized - it's easy to identify on a CV - and they can also be learned and trained through courses in general, workshops, webinars, among others.
Soft Skills
Soft skills, on the other hand, cannot be so easily measured, they require maturity and encompass the entire psychosocial experience of a person. Companies often translate these more subjective skills into their cultures. Here, we talk a lot about owner behavior, sense of urgency, collaboration and so on. Even if we say: "such a person has a great sense of urgency", the adverbs of intensity become even more relative. What is a lot? What is little? The World Economic Forum (WEF), which works to understand the situation of countries and, mainly, the impacts of globalization in the world, published an article showing that 40% of the current workforce will have to reinvent itself to meet the demands of the labor market. work in 4 or 5 years. The ability to solve problems, self-management and "working with people" are clear examples of soft skills while hard skills are very focused on technology and programming in this study. In this image, you can see a mix of hard and soft skills for the future that will require us to develop them right away:

It's not as simple as it seems for a person to develop the ability to self-manage, for example. It takes a lot of self-discipline, focus and responsibility. As well as assimilating a new language or learning a programming language, they will also require a lot of exercise/practice and self-management. It's that famous idea of ​​who comes first, but in the end, hard and soft skills go a lot together and are equally necessary. Elsewhere in the article, we also have the country cutout and, clearly not surprised by this fact, the most developed behavioral skill in Brazil until October 2020 was leadership and social influence, followed by a few others:

The pandemic has highlighted the emphasis we need to focus on well-being and more than that, I would say, on self-knowledge, which can even be a painful process in the short term. Seeing our weaknesses and enhancing our strengths are powerful strategies that we can acquire to adjust to the changes in this market in less than a decade. The truth is that for each type of person there is a unique path of self-knowledge.
It is also important to value the process as a whole, where it is often during it that we make great discoveries about ourselves. In addition, always be questioning yourself why you act and react to a certain situation, understand exactly what soft skills you want or need to develop and list people's references to "follow" them as an example or to ask for constant feedback.
These are good strategies for a kick in self-discovery! We left the idea of ​​a self-centered development process and went to a context where the exchange with the other is fundamental for the self-discovery of both. There are some other slightly more controversial topics about future work. According to the FEM article, humans and machines spend almost the same amount of time on tasks in the workplace by 2025. So what would this process of self-knowledge look like when we talk about machines and technology? But that's a subject for another post...