WHAT SOFT SKILLS WILL THE CONFINEMENT HAVE DEVELOPED IN US?
At a time when some of us are returning to work, we can say that this crisis has been very instructive about ourselves, our values, what matters to us and what we wish to change in the future. The famous good habits that we want to keep, the challenges we have gone through and the character traits that the situation has allowed us to develop.
It is these soft skills that I want to talk about, these personal and relational skills, which are neither knowledge nor know-how. In French we also call them “savoir-être”.
We contrast them with hard skills, these measurable, objectively assessable skills, those that we have acquired through our studies and training.
In the business world, recruiters are increasingly taking these skills into account, and no longer just the CV, previously considered the holy grail. !
They allow us to know whether a candidate will be able to communicate, behave, feel, listen and adapt adequately to the company and its environment, without only being an expert in the field for which he was hired.... In short, by taking these famous soft skills into account, we are reinjecting a little humanity into our profession, an element that has become essential especially after this crisis.
And if you realized during confinement that your current profession was no longer what you aspired to, taking stock and having developed this type of knowledge will boost your self-confidence and give you the courage to take action .
Here is an overview of those which, to our greatest joy, have largely developed during confinement:
- Empathy: we put ourselves in the place of the weakest and most exposed and we turned towards them. We became aware of the situation, even more complicated for them than for us, and we provided service, contributed, thanked and shared a little human warmth.
- Solidarity and cohesion: We came to the aid of the most vulnerable, those on the front line facing the virus, the oldest, the most vulnerable….And we mobilized by the thousands to achieve a common goal.
- Responsibility: we felt invested with a duty to protect our family, our children, our elders... We also felt responsible towards those who were at the front, by making the decision to stay at home so as not to not spread the virus. We took our responsibilities towards society, by reconsidering our way of living by realizing that we could live with less than we thought, in a more responsible and more protective way towards the planet.
- Adaptability and flexibility: We have learned to adapt to a particular and somewhat anxiety-provoking situation and to adjust and review our schedule, our habits... We have complied with the rules to protect ourselves and others.
We have certainly each developed many other skills but these seemed common to all of us at the end of this first period.
And even if we mainly talk about soft skills from an entrepreneurial point of view, these human qualities are of course an invaluable asset to develop in our everyday lives.
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