Gaining and improving your life skills throughout your professional career will enable you to handle workplace challenges and find solutions. Employers will always look to see what abilities and skills you hold to ensure you are the right candidate for the role.
What are life skills?
Life skills are what an individual uses to learn how to manage challenges and activities in their everyday lives. Developing these skills will contribute to improving personal and professional relationships which will prepare for new career changes. By building on existing skills it will help regulate your emotions, engage well with others and improve your own confidence and self-esteem.
Communication
Communicating is a critical skill required during your career and being able to do this effectively will help build good rapport with colleagues, clients and customers. Communicating effectively allows you to professionally share information and ideas you might have. Throughout your career you may develop a variety of different communication skills such as:
- Active listening
- Presentation skills
- Verbal communication
- Written communication
- Interpersonal communication
Working Together
Being able to work together as a team will be part of your everyday career to hit the goals of the business and progress. Acquiring conflict management skills will become useful as you might not always agree with your colleagues and being diplomatic will show that you respect their ideas and maintain good working relationships. Showing kindness, understanding and empathy to your colleagues will build on these relationships and create a harmonious team.
Making Decisions
Decision-making is a skill that we use throughout our personal and work life. This skill is important as it provides you with the ability to make a decision based on a few options. Businesses will look for this skill as it’s valuable to them in helping achieve goals within the business. Such skills you might acquire within decision-making is:
- Problem-Solving
- Critical Thinking
- Brainstorming
- Being able to evaluate and identify risks
- Organisation and prioritising
Time Management
Self-discipline in managing your time is very important as this will enable goals and deadlines to be met. It prevents stress from being behind and trying to continuously catch up. Balancing your work is important for your personal life as work can run into outside of working hours. Managing your time will overall make you feel better at work and in your personal life.
Resilience
Resilience is a key skill to hold throughout your personal and professional life as you will encounter challenges and sometimes failures. Learning how to reflect on challenges and failure will provide you with opportunities to grow and learn how to improve for next time. Approaching problems with a positive attitude will help you stay motivated and help you overcome them with solutions.
Technology
Many industries will require you to use some sort of technology and knowing how to use it and feeling comfortable is essential. Having basic skills can help improve tasks and duties you are required to do. Up to date training should be provided by your employer on how to use their software, making notes of this will be useful to help you in the future.
