The Importance of Soft Skills for Professional Success

Sure, you can remediate /r/ or help move a patient off a modified diet with the best of them—but how do your clients, coworkers, supervisors, and supervisees view you? Do they trust you and seek your advice? Do they enjoy being around you? Do they see you as someone who can roll with the punches? The point is, how are your soft skills—those interpersonal attributes that enhance your interactions, job performance, and career prospects? Soft skills—typically a combination of interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, and personal attributes—include work ethic, professionalism, courtesy, initiative, and communication. More difficult to teach than technical skills and knowledge, these soft skills are also challenging to measure. However, supervisors can rely on such proficiencies as strong indicators of job performance and success. In fact, recruiters at a college job fair admit favoring candidates with strong soft skills—even over grades and experience. A wide spectrum of job settings—including health professions—look for employees with good soft skills. Every audiologist and speech-language pathologist, at some point in their career, will encounter difficult supervisors and challenging patients, clients, and parents. We all experience frustrating job situations, less-than-optimal working conditions, productivity pressures, and unpleasant co-workers. Working on our effective soft skills in these 10 areas can increase our successful performance—as well as satis...
Source: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Press Releases - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Tags: Audiology Slider Speech-Language Pathology Professional Development Source Type: blogs