Welcome to Skills You Need. Here you will find a wealth of information about essential life skills that will help to improve many aspects of both your personal and professional life.
We are starting by developing sections on interpersonal skills, the soft or people skills that we all take for granted but can usually improve, and communication skills.
What are Interpersonal Skills?For many people today, a career for life is no longer an option. Most people expect to hold jobs with a variety of employers and move across different employment sectors through their working life. We all need to be flexible in our working patterns and be prepared to change jobs and/or sectors if we believe there are better opportunities elsewhere.
This means that the specialist, technical skills associated with different roles may be less important than the soft skills that can be transferred between different jobs and different employment sectors.
For employers, getting the right people means identifying people with the right skills and qualities to fulfil the role and contribute to the organization's success You should be aware that different roles have different requirements but the skills outlined below are required by employers across all employment sectors.
Interpersonal skills are vital when seeking employment, and may be the single most important factor for many recruiters. Having good interpersonal skills allows you to participate effectively as a member of a team, satisfy customers and clients expectations, negotiate, make decisions, manage your time efficiently, take responsibility, demonstrate leadership, and work effectively with other employees.
Learn how to improve your interpersonal skills...
If you are either applying for jobs or looking for a promotion in your current employer, you will need to demonstrate good communication skills. The ability to speak with a wide variety of people, maintain good eye contact, write clearly and succinctly, demonstrate a varied vocabulary and tailor your language to your audience are all essential skills that employers seek out. As your career progresses, the importance of communication skills increases since as well as creativity, people skills, and an aptitude for teamwork, the ability to speak and write with clarity and conciseness is essential for managers.
Learn how to improve your communication and writing skills…
Presenting information clearly and effectively is a key skill in the work place and presentation skills are required almost in every modern employment area. Whether you are an administrator, manager or executive, you should expect to present your ideas and findings to your work colleagues and external stakeholders. Presenting information does not just include making formal presentations, but information could be presented in the form of notes, reports, research findings, business plans, scenario planning, risk assessments and strategic documents.
Learn how to improve your presentation skills…
The latest QS recruitment survey (2010) lists the four most important skills sought by executive level recruiters as interpersonal skills, communication skills, strategic thinking and leadership ability. Developing your leadership skills can therefore not only help you to find a senior position, but may also help you to gain promotion with your current employer.
Learn how to develop your leadership abilities…
Most people need some IT skills to find work today. Acquiring basic IT skills and being familiar with using a computer may open up a wide range of employment opportunities and increase your marketability in the work place.
Learn how to improve your IT skills…
Numeracy involves an understanding of numerical data, statistics and graphs and numeracy skills are very important, irrespective of whether you consider a job to be "working with numbers". Having competence and being confident in working with numbers is a skill that can be used to your advantage in a wide range of employment settings. For example, knowing how profitable a company is, understanding value for money for purchasing, being able to analyse data in different formats are all considered essential skills in any organisation.
Learn how to develop your numeracy skills…
We aim to build a library of free, interesting and well written articles that will help you improve the skills you need to succeed in life. The site is under development (established 25 July 2011) and we are adding new content all the time so please bear with us in these early days!
