You're Smart. So What?: Examining the Importance of Soft Skills

http://blog.chrisdrane.com/?p=49

by csdrane • 13 years ago

30 33 13 years ago

blog.chrisdrane.com

jstanley• 13 years ago

"With the exception of the STEM fields, I would argue that soft skills actually are more important than how smart you are."

So you're saying "apart from fields where you have to be smart, it doesn't matter if you're smart"?

RougeFemme2• 13 years ago

Or - it matters, just not as much.

jmduke• 13 years ago

What an ironic way of proving the OP's point!

(Put another way: this is why so many STEM people get a bad rap.)

agentultra• 13 years ago

I was about to point out the same thing. Except in my experience you still need good soft skills to succeed in STEM-related fields. Pure technical ability and raw intellect will only get you so far. You still have to deal with politicking amongst peers.

outside1234• 13 years ago

its also important in STEM fields. how many executives or open source project leads do you know with no people skills?

mathattack2• 13 years ago

Take software development as an example. Half the battle is knowing what needs to be built, half the battle is knowing how to build it. The former aspect takes a lot of people skills. If it's a big project, the latter takes it too.

I would guess that building bridges is similar.

The best doctors have people skills too. "Bedside manner"

RyJones• 13 years ago

The third half is being able to explain / budget / justify / sell your approach. That might be subsumed in your second half, not sure.

sieisteinmodel• 13 years ago

Makes it sound as if those things were mutually exclusive. They are not.

I don't like the attitude of this article. Good soft skills will not compensate lack of smartness. This might not appear in a job interview (although good interviewers will notice), but it definately will later on.

Thus: also read books.

Aardwolf• 13 years ago

In other words: Being smart is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. And so is soft skills.

AtlanteanTec5• 13 years ago

I think this article is trying to say "Dont just read books". Not that the soft skills and book smarts need to be mutually exclusive. It just that with the current traditional way of teaching, there is a lot more emphasis on book smarts, good grades and other academia than there is about teaching "street smarts".

I completely agree that good soft skills or "street smarts" are no substitute for actual knowledge but sharp soft skills tend to land more interviews than being smart (Natural networking and all).

Ultimately though, I agree with you. Soft skills and "book smarts" shouldnt be mutually exclusive.

mcherm• 13 years ago

Good soft skills will not compensate lack of smartness.

Sure they will. I work with quite a few people who have been very successful in their careers on the basis of their soft skills, and who are (how do I put this) "not notably smart" in classical book-learning skills.

gadders2• 13 years ago

Good soft skills will not compensate lack of smartness

Ish. So for instance you can't be a complete fool, but if you hire people that are smarter than you are, and get them to work together as a team then soft skills can compensate for lack of smartness.

Obviously, to do this you need to have a realistic view of your own limitations. Dunning-Kruger sufferers need not apply.

AtlanteanTec5• 13 years ago

Thank you for this post. This actually resonated with me personally, because I felt like you were describing me in high school. I knew I was smart, I could ace tests easily without studying - and I didnt see the point in trying. And like you have said, I did not know anything about soft skills. No one ever talks about things like this.

I feel like there is a disparity between the curriculum in schools and the skills necessary to be prepared for "the real world" and by-in-large a lot of this knowledge is just assumed. Everything from learning HOW to study (and not just what you need to study to pass tests) to real world "skills" like balancing a budget. But hey, if you've taken the mandatory economics class, you know what bear and bull markets are so you should be set for life. Ah, but I digress.

Anyway, I for one, would love to read this your book. However, I cant see very many teenagers looking in the self-help section to pick up a book that will help them. While I completely agree that teenagers need to be made aware of, what I would call, "life lessons", a self help book might not be the best approach to getting the material out there.

stg• 13 years ago

Sorry for the diversion, but what is/was it like to be able to ace a test without really studying for it?

The only emotion I can ever recall feeling when staring down at an exam is abject fear as every fact I knew drained out of my head.

I was always a relatively bright kid, but never super smart. When I worked hard, I got top grades and when I slacked, I didn't. At some point I stopped working hard and drifted through education, getting a mediocre degree on the way (on the upside, I have great soft skills).

From discussions with other gifted people, I get the impression that most of them worked really, really hard, even if they didn't realise it. But I have heard the odd person who maintains it all came naturally. Is this you?

adeaver• 13 years ago

Sorry for the diversion, but what is/was it like to be able to ace a test without really studying for it?

Fairly anti-climatic. For someone that it comes easy too there is no real emotion or sense of accomplishment.

It would be like trying to explain the color green to someone that was born blind.

67726e• 13 years ago

I really think the answer for this is just going to be dependent on the person. For me, depending on the field, I could either ace it or possibly experience the abject terror. For the subjects that I could ace, e.g. (human) languages and CS, it was boredom/annoyance at even having to take the test. But then again I ultimately quit school and took a software "engineering" position.

AlisdairSH• 13 years ago

Tests never bothered me. If I bombed one, I could always study a bit for the next one. So, I rarely studied for them and I rarely completed daily assignments.

But, that said, my idea of skipping school was heading downtown to the GWU library. I started taking AP courses as a sophomore and always had long-term papers to write. I spent much of my senior year in a local wetland taking water samples.

There was definitely a balance. I tended to work hard at things that I enjoyed and completely blow off stuff that I deemed tedious or irrelevant. And overall, the balance usually fell in my favor.

There were students at school who were both smarter and harder working than I. And some of them were accepted at elite universities, where I landed at a top-notch public. But, we tended to have vastly different approaches to life. They live to work and found careers that they love. I work to live and found a career that I don't hate (but mostly, just want to get my paycheck and go mountain biking, kayaking, or something else outdoors).

And like another response indicated, this was all just natural. My peers were all overachievers, most of them naturally so.

LadyMartel• 13 years ago

I also went through most of middle/high school not having to really study things but somehow ending up with pretty stellar grades. To be honest, it made me arrogant and caused me to not appreciate the value of hard work in general. The more effortless an achievement, the more I respected it. Those who worked really hard were "try hards." Besides, I got better grades than them anyways.

In general there was an attitude among my circle of friends to try and show off how little work they can do to still pull off a high score. I would say yes, most of the people I know who are considered "gifted" in general do work harder in the background than they let on. They themselves probably want to believe that they can effortlessly achieve in the classroom (and probably in life).

I think for me, at least, what happened was that I would really get into things and work extremely hard for a short period of time (sometimes without realizing it) and then coast for a while and appear as though I'm super talented and naturally good at many subjects. I don't think I was consciously planning any of this, but it just happened that way.

Looking back now, I do think that the attitude was pretty immature and obnoxious.

foobarbazqux• 13 years ago

I think maybe it depends on what "without really studying for it" means? If you show up alert to each class, take notes, ask questions, and do a thorough job on your homework, the amount of specific exam studying that you need to do to ace an exam goes way down compared to if you slack up until the exam. If you've been doing this since first grade, the cumulative advantage by senior year high school is immense.

jmccree• 13 years ago

Boredom primarily, and a sense of competitiveness in trying to be the first to finish the test. Oddly enough, I get the same emotions filling out the patient information paperwork at doctor's offices etc.

Strilanc• 13 years ago

I always found tests kind of... interesting. I stressed about missing them, but learned to not worry about taking them. It helped that I was in CS/math/science courses. Questions tended to be semi-fun puzzles instead of memorization.

Actually, one of my favorite memories from university is from an algorithms test. We had to find nearest smallest neighbors, or something like that, in O(n lg n) time. Our professor was good, and an algorithms guy, so I was surprised when I realized it could be done with just two sweeps across the list [O(n)]. When I showed him (I was wondering if the question mentioning 'divide and conquer' was a hint or a restriction), he couldn't believe he'd missed it.

AtlanteanTec5• 13 years ago

Thanks for bringing this up. I cant speak for everyone else but I can tell you that I didnt always use to be good at test taking. In fact, whenever I get on this topic, I always talk about the story about a time when I moved to a different country in the middle of a school year and I moved there just it time for the comprehensive mid-year test in which I got the lowest test scores of any test in my life. And I mention that because after that, I had a bit of a revelation as far as how to prepare for tests.

I picked up the knack for listening to what teachers emphasized while teaching and correlated that to the home work, drew parallels and 9 times out of 10, most of what they had in common was on the test - so no extra studying needed. It was easier for things like Maths, Physics and Chemistry because you have a formula to use - and all the questions that revolved around these forumlae had keywords as far as what facts you have to use and what you need to find. Once you see the pattern, you can apply the forumula (which you've probably seen at least a dozen times in class and/or homework) at this point and its just applying it.

As far as things like vocabulary or other word definitions go, I've learned how to photographically remember things so I could breeze through a textbook and remember key words and/or key dates and look for those in questions on the test.

I dont mean to say that it is either hard or only gifted people can do it, I think everyone has their own unique learning style and once they figure out what works for them, tests can be easy.

seanccox• 13 years ago

If the thesis is, 'people need soft skills to get and succeed at their jobs', then wouldn't the article serve that thesis by articulating how one could obtain those skills? Instead, we have a citation of Kanye West, and as a result, the tone of the article is fairly anti-intellectual.

For high school students looking to develop soft skills: http://bit.ly/1b60sBm http://bit.ly/13Rjiay http://abt.cm/14nWouk

gadders2• 13 years ago

Also "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and:

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/6-habits-of-remarkabl...

UK-Al05• 13 years ago

The word "Soft Skill" is so undefinable, it is often used to attack people you simply don't like.

candybar• 13 years ago

The problem with articles like this is that it inspires precisely the wrong reaction. The best way to develop "soft skills" of the sort that matter is to stop caring about developing "soft skills" and to be genuine and be in touch with who they are internally. Don't worry about presenting yourself - care about who you are inside and seek to present it genuinely. Social fluence comes naturally when you stop pretending.

RougeFemme2• 13 years ago

Well. . .depends on what you include in "soft skills". The approach you describe works for some soft skills, but not all. For example, I don't think you can really be taught to be naturally empathetic. Some people may seem more empathetic because they are better at reading people, etc. But I don't think you can teach empathy. You can teach some skills that fall under the umbrella of communication - and I would call them soft skills. Effective facilitation of discussions. . .recognizing when you need to re-word what you're saying on the fly - and then doing it. . .looking for the value in differing opinions/approaches,even if you don't always find it. . .those are soft skills. Some people are naturally good in those areas; others need to be taught. Some may never be "good" or "best", but they can improve.

contrarain• 13 years ago

I found the quoted verse at the top so wrong, I had to create a throwaway to comment.

You're so smart, you're studying, you're 52, and when you die, you'll have nothing to clutch in your grave but your degrees.

Being 52 and in school is fucking awesome. You're old, you're not doing it because it's making you money. You're doing it for the pursuit of knowledge. You're doing it to learn from the fruits of labor of all that have come before you. You might make another discovery. You might not. But at this point, uncovering new things for its own sake is just fucking awesome.

But, says Kanye, but, says the rich and famous role model of yours: I'm smooth, I hustle, and when I die, I'm hugging my platinums in my grave. Maybe I'll even have a statue of me on my tombstone.

Maybe there's a subtext that I'm not getting. Maybe this is an alcoholic 52 year old who decided on a whim that he's gonna get smarter and somehow that's going to make him rich, and that's what West is talking about. But that's not what you're quoting. What you're quoting is a reflecting of your acknowledgement of that belief.

You're smart. Soft skills are important. Know what, I'm smart too, and I have soft skills, and I find the mentality conveyed in those verses pure, culture-destroying toxic. Maybe you're after hustle... But hustle is not "soft skills".

thatswrong0• 13 years ago

The number one way to ace an interview is to get the other person to like you.

Anecdotal evidence: I'm a college student and got my software engineering internship this summer because, according to the recruiter, I was better at communicating and more personable than the other candidates. Among people in my major (CS), I would say I'm pretty average in terms of intellect, so I actively work at these sorts of 'soft' skills to give myself some advantage.

ekm2• 13 years ago

Most people who ace tests without studying are usually just good auditory learners.In a school situation where classroom attendance is mandatory,they excel because it hones their style.Visual learners,the bookworms on the other hand ,endure the classes until after school when they can start taking in knowledge the best way they know how:by reading.

The first group always assumes they are smarter, which is not necessarily true.High IQ people belong to both groups.

You're Smart. So What?: Examining the Importance of Soft Skills

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