Importance of Soft Skills in building IT careers

Importance of Soft Skills in building IT careers
A lot has changed over the decade in IT industry and the related career options; however, one thing that has stayed true is the relevance of Soft skills that have played pivotal role in building IT careers. You may feel that you can easily carve out an IT professional out of a coding master and have a secret recipe to become an app developer or bagging a job easily in an ITES brand, but without the right soft skills the dream will simply be unattained. Really the secret to success in an IT career is not the technical skills only. Soft skills constitute of that 20% of the Pareto that brings 80% of success in stepping onto the career ladder. Soft skills refer to a person’s Personality traits. They often do not get taught in IT educational institutions or easily acquired by students through numerous learning opportunities. The World Economic Forum Report of 2020 suggested people management, emotional intelligence, coordinating with others and critical thinking to be among the most important Soft skills required in the workplace to excel and keep pace.

So, what are Soft Skills?
Soft Skills are personal traits that affect and influence the way you can work or interact with others. The characteristics of any business relationship at workplace are based upon how one forms and maintains relationships with their team workers. Trust and dependability on others, initiative taking and listening abilities will determine your behaviours at workplace.

Organisations tend to undervalue these skills and invest much lesser in upskilling their task force in these skills than the hard skills.

How do these Soft Skills gain importance in IT sector?
In most cases of IT stalwarts have taken hands-on experience by tinkering their computer in their garages or their unpaid internships. It reinforces how technical skills are much easier to cultivate and develop on the job than some of the soft skills. IT jobs may come in different bandwidths and pay scales, but these can be explored and acquired by showcasing the right soft skills in the selection rounds and at the workplaces.

Then, which are the Soft Skills that one must instil to have a rocking career in IT
1. Communication Skills

Almost every IT job requires good levels of communication skills – written and verbal play a pivotal part in determining how well you can communicate on emails and explain technical concepts to your juniors. Meeting communication will define how the tech ideas are shared and well understood by the co-workers. Security issues can increase due to the inability of a team leader to communicate right instructions and checklist to his team. As a manager, you will need to understand the verbal and non-verbal nuances of your team to delegate tasks, develop the right skills and retain the essential talent.

Just the end user’s profile and usability is important in a better application and its products, effective communication will reflect when one understands two sides of the communication process at workplaces. The ability to adjust your communication parameters and the lack of it can create ripple effect in the team. The entire team would face an escalation or consequences by the management because one person wasn’t able to effectively communicate and make his team understand the context and objectives well.

2. Empathy

Building technological tools is keeping in mind the psyche and feasibility study done from the end user’s objective. Take an example, a Marketing hire will be required to analyse the market trends and the buying psyche of an individual in his daily life. Likewise, a Tech professional or designers will need to understand and empathize the end user to resolve the issues in his product or services. The sheer lack of understanding and achieving the right fit will add to the miscommunication errors and the resulting costs.

Ability to empathize others will only augment the ability to help, collaborate and get tasks done far more efficiently by any engineer or team lead.

3. Creativity

Creativity is a broad spectrum to what one could easily say as ‘means to an end’. This skill requires one to think out-of-the-box, find alternative and innovative solutions to problems. Creative and critical thinkers have flexible mindsets and are prepared to brainstorm for many ideas. They are also ready to accept solutions from different team members. Although it may not be one of the yardsticks while hiring an IT professional, it is that skill that can set them apart from the herd. One of the major challenge today for IT sector is to find super solutions in a far more creative and feasible ways and cater to dynamic business needs of their client base.

4. Collaboration

As much as a tech professional deals with complex problems in his tools and codes, he can succumb to complex people issues. IT hires are mostly in the early age groups with a millennial mindset, they have high expectations from their employers. The ability to interact, anticipate and synergize diverse minds and talent to common goal will manifest into a good collaborative leader. To build champion and large teams in an IT workplace, one needs to foster communication, trust, and responsiveness. This Soft Skill will make one’s life easier, enrich work relationships, open the doors of communication and workflows, and position yourself well in organisational success.

5. Project Management

As an IT professional, you are expected to juggle multiple projects, meeting the right deadlines is highly critical. Despite holding large teams, one will need to make a blueprint of goals and deliverables and work with each stakeholder to resolve issues in the project. Refined project management skills will earn you more brownie points in form of larger projects, more visibility and accolades, and leadership positions.

It is highly common to undervalue the importance and relevance of these Soft Skills or overestimate your current Technical skills as a one-stop solution to all complex issues. You may be strong in your coding skills or technical know-how, but may rarely proceed to next level in the organisation because of the sheer lack of soft skills. These 5 skills will not only help you to pass the selection process but also make you a most-sought after employee at your workplace and a far more fulfilled career growth.

In today’s competitive, volatile and lean organisations, soft skills are important assets for any IT professional if they wish to stand out, open fruitful career options, and add equity to their Persona in rapid pace.

Top 4 Misconceptions About Careers in Finance

The finance industry is seen as a dog-eat-dog world with high risks and huge rewards. Stress levels are off the roof, too. Imagine stockbrokers and how they need to watch the market, play their hands and take a few people with them on their financial ascent. Imagine financial consultants who need to study their client’s accounts and advise them on what to do to save a little bit of money while earning a whole lot more. Financial careers seem to be fruitful, but why are there not a lot of people in the industry? It’s because of several misconceptions about it that puts off a lot of people.

Insane Hours
One of the main reasons why a lot of people don’t want to take a career in finance is because of the hours. They believe that for them to make a lot of money, they have to work fifty to sixty hours a week. While working that amount of hours is not impossible in finance, it is optional and highly dependent on how good you do your work. For instance, if you are a financial consultant, you actually have control over your hours. If you feel like the usual eight hours isn’t enough, you can add more clients for you to earn even more.

Get Rich Quick
Another misconception with financial career is that it is the promised land of financial freedom. With insane hours comes insane income, right? Not necessarily. Granted that financial jobs pay really well, but the pay you receive will be proportional to the amount of work you are doing and have already done. Initially, you’ll only be able to earn a lot by adding a lot of hours. Let’s take the consultant scenario again. As a newcomer, you’ll be posed with problems on finding clients. When you do find them, you start at a lower rate. This means you have to be working for more clients to earn good pay. Once you have already made a name for yourself and are valuable to your clients, you can start charging a higher rate.

It’s a Grind
If there’s anything people hate as much as working too much, it’s working too little. Some would look at financial careers as a grind; that it involves doing the same things over and over again for years. This isn’t true. When you embark on a financial career, you actually learn a lot of new things that you didn’t learn before you graduate. The more you stay in your chosen path, the better you become.

All About Banking
Finally, people think that a financial career only involves working at a bank. You actually have a good number of career paths with finance. If you’ve got the skills, you can work for any other company that deals in finances. For instance, you can work at loaning companies that cater to government employees. You can take your accounting skills and put them to use in insurance companies. If you really think about it, there’s a really big market for finance.

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How Can You Know More About the Lucrative SAP Careers for People in Kolkata?

As the course of SAP in Kolkata is one of the rapidly growing industries, many people with technical and non-technical skills want to work in the relevant industry. About 80% of SAP process involves business implementation while the remaining 20% involves technical implementation. You can get a prospective career in this field by a beautiful combination of technical and functional skills. Well prepared skills needs are finance spending chain and human resources. An easygoing career mentoring is preparing students to getting jobs as an SAP Security Administrator / SAP Auditor. This involves auditing system security and functional process in this System.

So, people with non-technical background can easily get into the information technology industry with necessary SAP training in Kolkata from the best institutions to have a lucrative career. The training of this process can be implemented in every aspect of a business and sales is no exception. In fact, businesses exist in the real world only with the aim of selling products or services. By optimizing sales processing, business overhead cost can be reduced and sales executives with the best required knowledge are now sought after.

SAP – Sales and Distribution Overview
The troubles and issues in the sales and distribution department will directly affect the revenue of businesses. The relevant Sales and Distribution (SD) module defines processing of master data, configuration, and transaction processing to ensure that Order to Cash process is streamlined. The SD module makes every aspect of sales such as orders, deliveries, pricing, billing and credit management completely accountable. Best SAP training in Kolkata in SD module will throw light on the different types of implementation in the sales process so that the sales department is up-to-date about the transactions.

Careers for Sales Executives
If you are working in the sales department already and eyeing the sales manager position, you may be interested in developing SAP experience to get paid more for the job you do. The experience you gain through sales and processing will greatly help you to become a sales consultant in this process. All businesses typically need experienced professionals to carry out sales and order processing so that a company generates profits at all times. Unlike typical sales professionals, SAP training the top institute in Kolkata will help you to stay ahead in the competition and thus, influence the profit of the organization directly.

Getting a career as SAP consultant and expert is not an easy task. You can’t just take this training and get information and technology industry job in a matter of a few days. In fact, the training is not just enough. While the effective tutorials will help you to understand the different concepts of modules and implementation, only industrial experience will enable a thorough understanding of the process. You need to go through full cycles of this technology implementation in the real world to call yourself a consultant or expert. For starters, junior consulting positions are available in which you can understand and indulge yourself in learning this course.

Irrespective of your age, if you have certification of the SAP course after getting a proper training, you can certainly make the career switch. Depending on the expertise you have in this course, you may even get paid more than what you have made so far. With a few years of experience as the SD consultant, you can quickly climb up the organizational ladder and become a prominent member of the sales department. There is no need to roll back once you have made the career switch to respective sales jobs, but you have to wait patiently and determine to learn the process thoroughly before seeing a major raise in your annual income.