Your hard and soft skills are always something you need to grow as a professional, and really in life. However, is one more important that the other. Before we answer that, lets make sure that we are clear on what these things are.
Hard skills
These are the skills that allow you to literally do things. Fix a car, build a house, etc. The benefits of these kinds of skills are:
- They are binary. You either know or you don’t.
- While not usually transferrable, these are skills that are always going to be necessary.
Soft skills
These are the skills that enable, convince, lead teams to doing the right thing. These are not the skills that get things done, but they are the skills that get things done.
So, which is it
I won’t give the answer ‘it depends.’ As much as I dislike saying this, soft skills will help you achieve long-term organization success more than the hard skills will. I am sure there folks that have really focused on a niche set of hard skills in high-demand area can achieve high levels of success, but without a good and growing set of soft skills your success is not transferrable to a broader set of circumstances. For those same people, if their skill set becomes less in demand, they will not be able to maintain their success without quickly pivoting to another skill set.
The ability to communicate, convince, and enable a wide audience helps make sure that you are seen as an individual that can broadly get things done no matter the context and constraints. Someone with great quality soft skills can work to find a complimentary group of individuals with the right hard skills to get the job done and that is also considered as a part of your skill set.
All skills are very important and having a balance of both is critical to achieve any sort of success. Don’t put yourself in any one box and work under the principle of the art of the possible, and you will be able to go very far in your career no matter what direction you choose to take.