Hard Skills will get you a job. Soft Skills will get you promoted

Most people on Medium and other platforms will write about the best Machine Learning algorithms of 2023, their top 10 Python books, the best Data Science courses, or roadmaps to become a developer in time record. These posts are convenient if you are starting your career in tech, but if you have landed a job, you should dedicate more time to developing your soft skills, not your hard skills.

Don’t get me wrong; hard skills — coding, mathematics, algorithms, data structures, statistics — are necessary for success. If you are unemployed or graduated from college recently, then yes, focus your time and effort on acquiring technical knowledge. Once you get a job, though, developing your hard skills is part of it. You will do it as naturally as breathing. Courses, blog posts, and tutorial videos become irrelevant compared to the experience gained while writing production code, working with multi-dimensional teams, and creating documentation.

The problem is that once people get hired, they fixate on their technical knowledge and forget about the other end of the spectrum: Soft Skills.

Senior engineers, architects, and analysts have something in common. They know how to communicate, they are able to estimate how long a task or a project will take, and they inspire inexperience team members to be exceptional. It impresses me how overshadowed these abilities are by tutorial-hells across platforms.

Furthermore, people do not comprehend how crucial Soft Skills are if you want to work remotely. Even when our generation — I’m Gen-Z, but this applies to Millennials too — was born with smartphones and computers, we have a hard time communicating effectively through Teams, Slacks, and similar platforms. These are not WhatsApp, Snapchat, or Instagram. Go straight to the point but convey enough information so even non-technical people can understand your technical knowledge.

And if you are struggling with writing concise and comprehensible reports, ticket comments, emails, or messages, you can take advantage of AI — ChatGPT, Bard, Bing — which are excellent at improving your ideas given the right prompts. Note, though, that even to utilize AI’s adequately, you must know how to transform your thoughts into words. The more you wander in your prompts, the worse the result are.

It does not matter how powerful an AI is. It still depends on you being able to materialize your ideas into analyzable texts.

This blog is not a “Top 10 ways to improve your Soft Skills” post — at least not this time. It is a call-to-action post. If you are still a junior after some years in the industry, stuck in tutorial hell, or overlooked by your manager, it might be time to consider how rusty your Soft Skills are.