Skill development is a process of identifying your skill gap and ensuring you develop these skills. Your skills determine your ability to execute plans and achieve your goals. Skill development and training is an integral part of an employee’s life. Organizations that encourage skill development have a stronger workforce, employees are motivated and engaged, and have higher productivity.

Your skill development – Hard and Soft Skills

There are 2 groups of skills –

1. Hard Skills

Skills related to tasks which can be quantified are known as hard skills. These tend to be knowledge based like expertise in a subject, certifications, and technical skills.

1. Soft Skills

Skills related to personality are known as soft skills. These include interpersonal skills like communication skills, flexibility, patience, negotiation skills, relationship building, problem solving, decision making etc.

A lot of people don’t understand that one needs to have a balance of both hard skills and soft skills to be successful in professional and personal life.

When you want to achieve your goals, your skills become your tools. If you have the right tools accomplishing goals becomes easy. Without the right skills you’ll not be able to work towards your goal, it will increase frustration, and lower your efficiency. That’s the reason why skill development and training is important. Channelize your energy to understand what the skills you have and which ones need to be developed and polished.

How to start developing skills?

• Start with the core skills

Core skills are the ones that you absolutely need to succeed in your goal and have a direct impact on your success. Secondary skills are those that will accentuate your skills but will act as supporting skills to your core skills.

If you’re starting in a new territory, say writing, programming, or coding, then you need to start by developing your core skills. It can be difficult at the beginning, but these skills will help you accomplish your goals.

• Break it into small steps

You cannot learn anything all at once. It is best if you break it into smaller parts. This makes it easy to learn and retain. Break the bigger skill into smaller parts for better understanding. For example, divide communication skills into smaller segments – active listening, body language, non-verbal communication, questioning skills, feedback etc.

• Learn from the best

One of the most important steps in skills development and training is to learn from the best in the industry. Bank upon the person’s experience and expertise and you’ll know you’re in the right hands.

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• Research well

Research to get various perspectives about the skill you want to develop. You can read books, online articles and journals, listen to podcasts, watch videos and web-series. The internet has so much knowledge, you just need to have that expert eye to get the best information.

• Attend trainings

Whatever skill you want to develop – customer service, effective communication skills, negotiation and problem solving, or conflict management, there are various kinds of online and offline trainings that you can learn from. Make sure you research thoroughly about the content and the trainer of the workshop before enrolling any kind of skill development and training workshop.

• Act

When you’ve done all the above steps, it is finally time to put all the knowledge into action. Whatever skill you want to develop, it cannot be done without practice. The more effort and time you put in for practice, the better your skills will be.