Acquire the Right Skills Deliberately

In the previous chapter, we talked about growing your network to support you. We taught you how to take responsibility and take action for your career. We shared how to actively ask for help, how to listen and ask good questions, how to have crucial conversations, how to effectively negotiate with other professionals, and how to accept feedback. In this chapter, we will cover how to acquire the right hard and soft skills deliberately. What really matters for developers are the skills they build in their careers. There are significant differences in acquiring soft and hard skills. Once those differences are understood, it can boost your skill acquisition. This chapter will discuss the differences between hard and soft skills, and how you can practice those skills for the best results in your professional life.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Soft versus hard skills – the reality
• The science behind acquiring skills...

Soft versus hard skills – the reality

Many technical job listings emphasize the need for “soft skills”; these can be skills such as empathy, communication, or critical thinking. In the world we live in today, why do we call them “soft?”

The term “soft skills” dates back to the US military in the 1960s, when “soft skills” entailed anything that did not require the use of machinery. The term has migrated to the corporate world and is often misapplied to colloquially refer to interpersonal skills or emotional IQ. The demand for these skills has risen in recent years. There is an assumption that these skills are easy to develop or are somehow intrinsic to some individuals. The idea that “hard skills” are more important or valuable than “soft skills” is unfortunate and soft skills are often stereotypically associated with women. Employers look for competencies and critical skills and offer training...

How do we improve our skills?

Let us think about what skills are important for us to increase our abilities. Most people think of hard skills as technical skills and soft skills as people skills. Although there is some truth to that, it is not a solid definition of hard and soft skills. Some people believe that hard skills or technical skills, because they are hard, are difficult, but that is not a solid definition either.

What are hard skills?

We do not call hard skills hard because they are difficult. We call them hard because they are precise. Hard skills are skills that need specific precision. Imagine, for example, typing on a keyboard.

You need to be very precise with your finger movements to type fast; the more precisely your fingers move on a keyboard, the faster you type. To be a better typist, what you need to do is improve the precision of your fingers’ movement – the faster your brain is able to send signals to your fingers, the faster you’...

Key skills to develop

Heather selected her top five skills to develop to excel in your career. These are skills she looks for when hiring and in her community engagement work. You can improve your skills in these areas by practicing them with other people in various scenarios, even beyond your work life, such as in your personal or family life. These skills will help to enhance and improve your life in general, as well as your career:

• Communication: In order to be able to progressively enhance other soft skills, you need to be an effective communicator. One of the more important aspects of communication that may seem counterintuitive is listening. You need to listen more than you speak. This can be difficult for many people. Remember to listen or read to understand something, not in preparation to simply respond and put across your point of view. Really try to understand what the other parties are trying to communicate.
• Collaboration: You need to be an excellent communicator...

Interview

Arun Gupta

Arun Gupta: Heather, thank you very much. I’m super excited about this opportunity.

My name is Arun Gupta. I am the vice president and general manager of the open ecosystem team at Intel.

A few years ago, if somebody had asked me if I saw myself working at Intel in this job, I would have not even imagined it, and I’m very grateful to all the wonderful people that I’ve been surrounded with, the impact that the community has had on me over the years, and all the good wishes that I received that got me here.

Now, I’m not discounting all the technical work that I’ve done over the years with multiple communities. I’ve been fortunate – over the last several years, I’ve been paid to come and work for a nice big company, and that is only possible because, essentially, I was doing a lot of work out in the community – blogging, writing, authoring a book, giving keynotes all over the world in more...

Summary

In this chapter, we talked about learning the correct hard and soft skills deliberately. You should now be able to identify the diverse types of skills, know how to acquire skills reliably, incorporate practices to acquire hard skills as well as soft skills, and also know how to practice these skills in real life.

In the next chapter, we will discuss how to operate outside of your comfort zone.