Coming from a software development background, I used to think hard technical skills are everything. I even looked at people without the technical skills with pity, and wonder how anyone can possible do any meaningful work without a deep understanding of all the intricacies of technology.
Fast forward 4 years, my career has taken quite a few turns, now I’m an Enterprise Architecture for a large retailer chain. It’s becoming more and more clear that having technical skills is nice but is not enough.
The problem with moving from programming to other fields is that now I’m dealing mostly with people. It’s not that when I was a programmer I didn’t have the deal with people, but most of the time a programmer spent was in front of a computer thinking up algorithms. I enjoyed it tremendously, and found the work quite satisfying.
However, with programming becoming a commodity with the influx of foreign talents and offshore-outsourcing, development looks less and less like a viable option.
I’m glad I made the decision into going into application, solutions then enterprise architecture. It’s been a long road where I learned a lot of things. But only recently, in the past year have I seriously focused developing my soft-skills.
By soft-skills, I meant non-technical skills. These are mostly skills dealing with people and non-technical situations such as leadership, decision making (rational and intuitive), negotiation, influence, emotional intelligence, public-speaking, communication, and time management. There are also character traits that one can learn to develop such as persistence, optimism, conviction, self-confidence, etc…
I now understand one can not succeed without the soft-skills. Because success comes much easier when you surround yourself with the right people and choose to deal with the right people.
On the surface, soft-skills do not seem so important, what if you are an extremely shy but steller programmer, you’ll still be fine doing what you do. However, if you ever want to move to another job that requires dealing with people on a daily basis (as simple as team leads or architect), having the right soft-skills are absolute crucial.
There are two attributes to people skills that make them more valuable to technical skills.
- They are transferable. Soft-skills can be used wherever you work, and are applicable to life in general.
- They don’t become obsolete as quickly as the technical skills.
People may argue those two points, and I can just imagine someone saying “yeah, you are saying that only because you are doing architect work now”. But sooner or later, they will realize the value of soft-skills unless as well.
I’m doing saying technical skills are not important, on the contrary, they are very important, and my work depend a lot on it as well. What I’m suggesting is that you spent time developing your soft-skills as well. As I’m developing them, I keep finding new and exciting things to learn.
I hope you will become more success when you master the soft-skills that can make your better at what you do.
More on the specifics of the soft-skills later.