Soft Skills to Future Proof Your Career
In our modern and digital world, everyone is looking for skills that will make a difference at work or when trying to find a new job. Last month we invited Evan Burkosky, Country Manager at Dynamic Yield, to be a guest speaker in our live webinar. He gave fascinating insights about relevant skills in Society 5.0 and how to future proof your career.
He focused on five essential soft skills that will prove useful and fundamental for your career:
Presentation Skills
Sales Methodology
Digital Marketing
Japanese Language
Customer Service
1. Presentation Skills
Everyone needs strong presentation skills, regardless of their position, job or industry. Good presentation skills are both verbal and visual. They are one’s “ability to tell a good story”, whether it is when making a sales deck, giving a custom demo or responding to a request for proposal. Whatever you are presenting needs to be both visually and verbally appealing.
2. Sales Methodology
Even if you are not directly involved with the sales divisions in your company, you still need a good understanding of sales methodology. These skills are essential in order to understand how to approach and retain business partners and customers, as you will most likely have to face such situations at some point in your career, regardless of your position.
Many people seem to believe that sales is only about meeting clients for drinks and dinner, and that it is sufficient to seal a deal but, nowadays, it is substantially more than that.
You need to understand how many sales motions are required to open a deal, how to move it through the sales pipeline, how to close it, and how to renew the deal later on.
Most importantly, you also need to get market feedback on your sales processes to understand why and what made things happen the way they did. With this feedback, you will be able to improve your offer, and your own methodology.
3. Digital Marketing
Most industries cannot ignore the increasing importance of digital marketing and the same applies to their employees, as well as future employees.
Essential digital marketing skills include lead generation as well as lead qualification. This is necessary, because they are main actors when it comes to helping meet sales quota.
4. Japanese Language
It might sound quite obvious, but strong Japanese language skills are necessary if you are working in Japan or planning on working here. This includes both written and spoken skills, and at least the equivalent of the JLPT N2 if you are aiming for a client- facing role. There are different ways to acquire fluency and it can be done with real life experiences if you do not happen to be too much of a study person.
5. Customer Service
Last but not least, one of the most important soft skills to have is an understanding of real customer service. In Japan, a very common word and concept that comes up when mentioning customer service is omotenashi.
Omotenashi stands for Japanese high quality customer service and hospitality, but it is actually heavily process-based and by-the-book. This leaves no room for flexibility and options, which are usually what Western customers tend to look for.
There is a real need to learn about what leads to good customer service in general, and to see beyond omotenashi. Customer service should satisfy customers’ actual needs, and is most definitely not a course of actions written in an operation guide.
In a world where not only technology but also different business divisions are more and more interconnected, it is crucial to at least understand the necessary needs and processes in each department. These are the soft skills you should aim for, if you have not picked them up yet.
But soft skills by themselves are not enough, you need to combine them with some hard skills in order to truly future-proof your career. If you are interested in the types of hard skills you should acquire in order to be successful, you can read Evan’s take on hard skills here.
Faustine Verhaeghe
Marketing