5 Soft Skills You Didn't Know Could Help You Thrive in Tech

Professional tech jobs are often regarded as stoic, process-oriented, and mechanical. This isn’t without reason, as tech practitioners do rely on standardized processes to write code, protect networks, or extract data. But they also use soft skills to share this work with the world.

Otherwise known as interpersonal skills, soft skills are the strengths or traits that enable a person to interact effectively with others. Including these in your career skills portfolio can help you stand out from your job market competition.

A study by Business Name Generator found that 84% of employees and managers believe new employees must possess soft skills and demonstrate them during the hiring process. This suggests that soft skills, like teamwork and leadership, are highly valued and sought after at all levels of an organization.

Read on to discover 5 soft skills you might not have considered essential for a tech career, and how they can be utilized and optimized for the tech workplace.

1. Collaboration and Teamwork

Technical roles are inherently team-oriented. Software engineers depend on cross-team collaboration to test and optimize code, while data analysts create visualizations to illustrate their findings to non-technical audiences, and tech practitioners of all industries work as part of a team.

Strong collaborators anticipate the needs of others while allowing them a chance to speak for themselves. In tech, this can look like maintaining multiple open communication channels, planning talking points ahead of meetings, and delegating tasks clearly.

2. Empathy

Approaching technology from a user-focused perspective has been proven to optimize development processes and ultimately result in stronger products. This requires adopting the mindset of a user, which, in turn, requires empathy.

Empathy matters internally, too. Google’s Project Aristotle findings identify psychological safety—the belief that you will not be punished for making a mistake—as the #1 factor driving high-performing teams. Tech professionals can cultivate empathy in the workplace by keeping calm in strained circumstances and granting their colleagues grace and support when mistakes are made.

3. Persistence

At their core, tech roles are all about creative problem-solving—which naturally attracts puzzle enthusiasts and those who love a technical challenge. But to want to work through those challenges and find innovative solutions again and again, as tech workers must, requires persistence.

Build persistence by pursuing an ambitious project or by consistently recording and refining the techniques you use to approach a challenge. You can also demonstrate persistence to your current or prospective employer by outlining the steps you took to solve a work scenario for which there was initially no clear solution.

4. Curiosity

Like persistence, curiosity is a trait naturally present in successful tech professionals. As a tech training institution, we often hear from students that their decision to change careers was sparked by a desire to learn more about a specific technology’s function.

According to the World Economic Forum’s annual Future of Jobs Report, curiosity and a willingness to try new things consistently rank among the top skills for tech professionals.

Amplify your own curiosity in tech by allowing yourself to follow topics that pique your interest. Without curiosity, tech professionals would never be driven to learn a new programming language, optimize a data extraction tool, or add a layer of encryption to prevent cyberattacks. This soft skill is essential for tech practitioners because it drives the motivation to build hard technical skills as well.

5. Leadership

Essential for executive and managerial positions in tech, leadership qualities also help professionals at all levels of an organization foster healthy team dynamics. Characterized by integrity, team advocacy, and personal accountability, tech professionals with strong leadership can seamlessly see projects through to fruition.

Facilitate leadership in your tech role by investing in yourself and your skills. Read leadership resources, actively listen to constructive feedback, and examine the qualities you’d like to emulate in your organization’s leaders (and, perhaps more importantly, those you would not wish to emulate).

The Impact of Soft Skills in Tech Careers

While technical skills are the foundation of any tech career, they are only one part of the equation. Soft skills, like collaboration, empathy, persistence, curiosity, and leadership, are just as essential to success and fulfillment in your role. These interpersonal abilities enable you to not only build great products but also to work effectively with others, solve complex problems, and adapt to the ever-evolving tech industry landscape.

Learn how you can develop technical and soft skills at the same time with comprehensive live online tech training by Fullstack Academy.