What are the real skills that serve you life time?

We interview two most promising candidates for one important position for the company.

The two candidates have stellar resume, great interviews (three rounds after initial screening interview). They both are in their early forty, full of energy and ambition.

The executive interview committee members come together to vote for The One after the last round of interview. Strangely, contrary to previous Interview results, this vote is tilted to candidate B.

The reason?

Most committed members feel certain uncertainty about candidate A, but hard to put a finger on the exact reason.

I would call this as instinct, a haunch, or a doubt, or may lack of some trust.

As matter of fact, we all have similar experience under different circumstances. We know some people have excellent education, but hard to connect, difficult to work with. These people, we say, lack of “soft skills”.

Soft skills we refer here include personality traits, such as

• resilience,
• generosity,
• honesty,
• open minded,
• empathy,
• sympathy,
• grit,
• kindness,
• communication skills,
• Emotional maturity…
• etc.

As a matter of fact, these so called soft skills are The Real Skills we all need to have a sustainable career, to have fulfilled and happy life.

Employees without these real skills, a company will not operate healthily for long. And employees will not be very happy working there.

These real skills are difficulty to measure, to quantify. Therefore, it’s difficulty for companies to use them as hiring criteria.

Knowing there are so many self helping books regarding the development of these skills, more and more coaches come to help people discover their real skills, I feel the time for mastering the real skills is coming.

To develop these real skills is hard. It is scary. It needs a lot of work.

We will get to face:

• our fear of imposter
• Fear of imperfect
• Fear of not good enough
• Fear of rejection
• Fear of failure…

Only when we take charge of fear, we can take a moment to see things from other’s shoes. We can bounce back to our life to do things we get to do. We can grow our muscles stronger. Then we can develop our real skills further.

Educations are necessary for us to learn.

The real skills can get us to a more productive, happier and long lasting route.