What is "Soft Skills"?

Soft skills help an individual to perform better in life, interact more efficiently with others and have better personal attributes. Unlike hard skills, which focus on specific areas and are more technical, soft skills are applicable to a broad spectrum of areas and can benefit everyone.

Soft skills are best understood through the following areas:

• Communicating
• Leading
• Delegating
• Presenting
• Motivating
• Productivity
• Influencing
• Empathy
• Sociability

Soft skills are now recognised as one of the most important areas of business profitability since by increasing the communication skills of staff you can significantly increase their productivity and the company throughput.

In fact, soft skills are now so important that we can no longer accept old fashioned pushy autocratic styles of management. Instead, we are interested in empathic leaders who can understand people and connect to them. Their soft skills seem to be far more important than their CV or their technical ability.

Everyone has some experience in soft skills, though most people are unaware of the importance of these skills. Perhaps this is to do with the legacy of our education, where a lot of emphasis is put on hard skills and soft skills are somewhat neglected in comparison.

Fortunately, soft skills are like any other skill. They can be thought, learned, practiced and mastered. The key is to use the skills persistently and continuously monitor progress towards an ideal goal.

Why Those With High EQ Will Succeed More Than Those With High IQ

Traditionally, IQ has been synonymous to intelligence and subsequently was correlated to success. Significant research on emotional intelligence shows that EQ (Emotional Quotient) is an equally important measure of a person’s emotional skills which is directly related to their success.

This suggests that we can plot a person’s overall ability across two dimensions; EQ and IQ. Now consider a typical large company who employs a variety of capable employees. Companies are usually interested to hire intelligent staff and hence their focus is primarily on technical skills. In other words, companies go for high IQ people, in particular if they happen to be a technology company. Here is the distribution of employees using the IQ/EQ graph in a typical technology company.

The green area is the collection of people found in a successful company. They have high IQ. Suppose you are one of these employees and want to succeed and perform better than others. Since the company generally employs high IQ people, there is not much difference between individuals as all have relatively high IQs. How can you distinguish yourself from others in such an environment? As the graph suggests, the EQ dimension is great to differentiate yourself from others and move towards the top right corner of the graph where the most capable people reside. In other words, technical skills are good to get a job, but you need emotional skills to move up when you have the job.

Hence, in a competitive environment of a company where most people are already high IQ, the best way to stand out is to focus on EQ. This is best achieved by systematic training on emotional intelligence and soft skills. The best staff are those that are good at both EQ and IQ and an organisation full of these kind of people will no doubt be very successful.

We are proud that soft skills courses provided at Skills Converged are a step towards this ideal.

Our Mission Statement

“To be the largest provider of soft skills content for anyone who wants to learn the skills or teach the skills to others.”

Skills Converged provides unique soft skills training material and resources that you can use on their own or in combination with your own course materials. In addition, companies striving towards a more successful and productive team can benefit from our in-house customised courses delivered by one of our experienced and qualified trainers. Why Buy Training Materials? The essence of productivity is to save time by not doing something which is already done and not doing something that can be easily delegated to others. In today’s world, outsourcing is the key. Rather than spending your precious time on research and development of training courses, you can get a head start by using Skills Converged competitively priced high quality course materials. We will do all the hard work for you, so you can focus on custom packaging and delivery of the content rather than the design from scratch. See the use cases for examples of using training materials.

Why so Flexible?

Most companies protect their course materials and limit their customers in their use. Skills Converged is different. Our aim is to save you time by supplying high quality materials which can be used immediately in training. All our courses include source files (i.e., Office Word, Office PowerPoint, etc.) that can be easily edited and used in your own courses. Once you receive the course material you have unlimited rights to use, edit, modify and store the content in preparing your own training courses (see terms). We are proud to be a unique company that offers such flexible services to our clients.

Impressed? We hope so. Our passion for research guarantees high quality and informative materials which we are sure it will impress your clients. At Skills Converged, we understand that there is no single answer to everything. We value our customers greatly and continuously take steps to reflect on their feedback and continuous support to improve our teaching and training materials so we can provide a better service.

Here is a summary of what you get from Skills Converged when you obtain training materials:

Content:

• State of the art research using the latest findings in psychology, IT and social sciences.
• Ready-to-deliver course material for many soft skills subjects
• You can use Skills Converged course material as building blocks in your custom made training courses.

Features:

• Comprehensive package contains all you need to deliver a course
• Your right to customise, edit and modify the content as you desire
• The license lets you mix and match the source material with your own content and use it for distribution to your delegates
• Print-on-Demand ready
• Unlimited reprinting rights
• Unlimited number of users
• Receive all source files in Office 2010, 2007 & 2003
• Stylish design makes these courses stand out from the competition
• Easily explain complex topics using elegant illustrations, graphs and diagrams included with each course
• Buy and download in minutes for rapid delivery

Package Contains:

• Specific course guideline
• General guide on methodology and best practices
• Slides
• Course workbook
• Script/Course notes
• Handouts
• Exercises
• Course outline
• Recommended readings
• ... and other resources such as feedback forms, certificate of achievement, etc.