You work most of your life to pursue a fulfilling career. To be successful in your field of work, it is important to have the skills you need to do your job, just as it is important to do what you love to enjoy your work.
The soft skills you need to work in perfect harmony and cooperation with others and increase productivity are another factor that can help you succeed at work in the long run.
Your personality traits, (or soft skills), enable you to work effectively and amicably with others in your organization.
These include traits such as effective communication, teamwork, curiosity, and the ability to influence others in the company. If you have the necessary soft skills, you will be able to stay ahead of your peers and build a meaningful professional life.
Relevant experience and certifications will help you land a job.
Your experience, credentials and technical skills (also called hard skills) show an employer what you are capable of and how intelligent you are in relation to the tasks assigned to you. Your soft skills, on the other hand, represent emotional intelligence and refer to your attitude and personality.
If you are looking for a successful career, your IQ will help you get a foothold in the company, but your EQ will help you stay in the job and move up.
Below are the top five qualities you need to have for a successful career no matter what your field is;
1. Curious mind
Curiosity is the mother of invention. If you are curious, you can learn vast amount of new knowledge about your specific field, develop your skills or earn new ones, and come up with innovative ideas that your company and yourself need to grow and succeed.
When you are curious, you can take initiative and solve organizational problems on your own instead of waiting for your manager to tell you what to do. You will gain authority and respect of your team members and your boss.
With creativity, you can try new ideas without fear of making mistakes.
You can also challenge assumptions and conventional wisdom to find more innovative solutions that may be faster or less expensive to implement.
2. Excellent communication skills.
To work with people to achieve business goals, you must be a good communicator. Excellent communication might be the top skills among all to achieve a successful career.
In this scenario, communication can be verbal, nonverbal or written, but you still need to know how to get your message across and unite your team behind a common goal.
Explaining, persuading, inspiring and presenting projects or task plans are all components of effective communication.
When communicating in writing, do not hit "send" as soon as you finish an email. To ensure your message is understandable, concise, and conveys the right goals, take the time to reread it and make changes as necessary.
A good communicator is also an active listener. To respond appropriately to others' requests and avoid communication gaps, you must be able to listen to others and understand what they want. Here are a few habits you could consider developing while listening to others.
Turn your body to the person you are listening.
Do not interrupt. Let him/her get it out.
Listen with empathy.
Make facial expressions (or say yes, or no, etc.) to show that you are listening.
Take notes if necessary.
Reflect back when it is time (let him/her finish first)
Do not grin or smirk. Just listen respectfully.
Ask clarifying questions to understand what they meant exactly.
As you advance to positions of greater responsibility in your company, you must be able to interpret and communicate ideas and information in a way that the recipients of the message can quickly grasp and take action.
When communicating in writing, do not hit "send" as soon as you finish an email. To ensure your message is understandable, concise, and conveys the right goals, take the time to reread it and make changes as necessary.
3. Influencing techniques
To be successful in your field of work, you must be able to persuade others and drive change within your organization.
In most organizations, you work in teams and often rely on the support of others to complete specific tasks and achieve organizational goals.
As you achieve results within the organization, your ability to work with others and influence or persuade them to participate in these activities is critical.
You must develop leadership skills necessary to convince others to accept your ideas and mobilize a team to implement them.
Selling your vision and ideas is about convincing others that what you say is the best path for the company.
Here are a few tips you can benefit to improve your influencing skills;
Improve your communication skills.
Learn active listening.
Build connections, network.
Ask genuine questions.
Be trustworthy. Keep your promises.
Be assertive with your ideas.
Be flexible to change your opinions.
Don't be argumentative. It usually goes nowhere.
Help others.
Be a teacher. Share your knowledge.
Be the person people come to you for help, or just to talk.
4. Courage and self-confidence
Self-confidence is the foundation of everything and critical to developing solutions for your business.
When you work with others in your company, it will be easier for them to believe you and listen to you if you have self-confidence.
Knowing your strengths and weaknesses will help you be more confident as a leader, which in turn will boost your confidence.
A successful career depends on you having the courage to make decisions and follow through.
Many people are discouraged from expressing their ideas in a company because they are afraid of saying the wrong thing or making a mistake.
Courageous people are different. They recognize that mistakes are opportunities to learn and help them grow and make better decisions in the future.
To be successful in your career, you should develop your self-confidence and courage.
5. Results-oriented
The company needs you to get tasks done.
It's no use having all the employees you need if you can not translate their skills into results that help achieve the company's goals.
You need to be able to push yourself to achieve goals, and you need to inspire people inside and outside your organization to take action to achieve quantifiable results.
You must be a team player who is always thinking about and contributing to the success of your team if you want to achieve results. It is very likely that you will be personally successful as your team grows.
Conclusion
To be successful in your career, you need to be able to develop both the hard and soft skills required for your job.
As you excel in soft skills, you will see that more opportunities will knock on your door.
As the saying goes, "success is a state of mind," and you need to foster the right qualities to pave the way to progress, satisfaction and success.
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