College days are considered as best days of someone’s life, but while we enjoy friendships in college, we also learn some of the essential life skills in college. When an employer search for employee they look for specific soft skills apart from technical skills, technical skills are essential for performing duties but soft skills make the real difference in an average and a great employee.
Let’s look at some of the TOP desired Skills:
- Complex Problem Solving: – One of the very critical skill is Complex Problem solving as for solving a complex problem one has to keep several interdependent subsets of problem in mind, which makes it difficult to solve such complex problems. This Makes Complex problem solving a one of the most desirable skills for employers. Reasoning & Ideation will be ones go-to tools for achieving a robust Complex problem-solving skillset.
- Creativity, Originality & initiative: – In general people tend to reciprocate what they have already experienced or learnt. Which is a broadly opposite to creativity, and Originality. People who want develop creativity and Originality should ponder upon different ways of solving a problem even if they know about one way to answer a question they should look for and think about various other ways to solve. Creativity and originality helps in many ways, most importantly it helps to stand apart in crowd. Taking Initiative is also a very good way to develop and demonstrate creativity & original thinking. If we look closely, we can easily find that most people who take initiatives are generally creative and possess original thinking capabilities.
- Leadership & Social Influencing Skills: – Leadership skills are very desired from personal & employability perspectives. As human works in social groups this skill makes an integral part of any group, contrary to popular belief leadership skills can be acquired and demonstrated by any individual irrespective of their hierarchical position. People look up to their leader for guidance and support. A leader is always an enabler. While in college this is one skill that can get you places. Some very basic qualities of a leader are honesty and Integrity, confidence, Inspiring nature, Commitment and passion, Decision making qualities, accountability, good listening capabilities, Delegation and empowerment, Empathy and resilience, Emotional intelligence, humility, transparency, Vision & Purpose. People who wants to be leader should practice and diligently develop above mentioned qualities.
- Technology Design & Programming: – In today’s technology driven world its quite natural that Technology use, design and Programming are in this list of desirable qualities. It’s very easy for those who love techy stuff and curious towards new technological developments but for those who doesn’t feel very enthusiastic about technology or technology monitoring and controls should ensure that they go an extra mile to have understanding and knowledge about technology because without technological know-how it’s tough to succeed in a world where most work is influenced or performed by continues evolving technologies.
- Active Learning and Learning Strategies: – Active learning is a way of learning by participating beside passive listening. This skill is very useful as learning never stops and if someone uses various learning strategies to learn new thing and it becomes second nature to him. Learning methods like Elaboration (describe the idea with many details), Interleaving (switch between ideas while you learn different things), Concrete example (Use specific Examples while learning about abstract ideas), Dual Coding OR Word–Visual Technic (using combination of words and Visuals while learning something), are some of the example of various learning technics. For some people one way or technic may work and some other method may work for others
- Resilience, Stress Tolerance & Flexibility: – Success has its own price and resilience is one of the very noticeable price one has to pay in order to achieve success. As we all know resilience is quality of “bouncing back” when we face disappointment, failure Or Defeat.
This trait gives a never say never attitude to the beholder, and help to boost their confidence over time. Stress tolerance is also a part of a resilient personality. From an employer perspective stress tolerance in their employees are a must have trait, a stress tolerant personality will manage the days to tasks deadlines etc. better.
Flexibility to adapt and flexibility to toil to achieve the bigger goals is also utmost important skills, which is desired in employees as this ensures employees are aligned and dedicated towards larger organisational goals.
All in all, college life can be very fun and useful for developing someone’s skills as it present itself with immense opportunity and energies to acquire new skills which can be highly helpful for life beyond college days. Let’s get ready for challenges by preparing ourselves for them.
