Are soft skills worth developing in programmers’ work? Not only worth, but necessary. They are equally as desired as technical knowledge and expertise. The success of a project depends on the sum of team members’ technical skills and experiences, but also on the ability to communicate, cooperate, and adapt. What’s worth developing then?
Delivering Your Message
Communication? We’ve all heard about it. It’s in the agenda of every soft skill trainer, it’s a top topic of every self-development podcast, blog and guidebook. What does it mean to communicate effectively? It’s a clear and ordered delivery of your message; it’s making sure what has been conveyed is understood; it’s adjusting your communication style to your audience. Effective communication means providing and receiving feedback. All of the above contribute to the success of agile-run projects and to the ability to produce a working quality software at the end of each iteration.
Teamwork & Collaboration
The responsibility to deliver a solution lies with all team members. Project’s success depends on a joint effort of specialists with varying levels of knowledge, experience, style of work, and the position they hold. Hence, knowledge sharing, mentoring to the less experienced teammates, and openness to other points of view seem to be crucial elements. Even if it sometimes requires resigning from your individual goals, focusing on the team’s goal and putting team’s benefits first is of equal importance. The ability to admit to, discuss, and analyze a mistake increases levels of trust. All of the above translate into a good atmosphere, a motivating work environment, and accelerating the achievement of shared objectives.
Willingness to Upskill
Keeping track of news, continuous improvement of skills and broadening one’s knowledge are inherent to programmer’s work. Specialists who demonstrate this competence constantly engage in activities that contribute to their development. They ask others for information on their progress and use the acquired information in further development. They focus on changes and improvements in everyday work. This allows them to keep up with the dynamically changing IT market, to be ready to tackle new challenges and to meet expectations of future employers.
Flexibility & Adaptability
The work of a programmer also means constantly changing projects, teams or clients for whom projects are implemented. Flexibility refers to being open to inevitable changes, to adapting to the work in new conditions and in an unstructured or dynamic environment, to cooperating with various people of different preferences and experience. Adaptable employees modify their approach to tasks based on the preferences of stakeholders and the unique demands of each situation. Flexibility skills manifest themselves in both attitude and action – and one can’t exist without the other. Having developed adaptability skills benefits in better responding to and remaining abreast of all possible work-related challenges throughout your professional live.
These are the qualities which we look for during recruitment to Edge One Solutions and develop within our internal development programme PDP. We believe that employees who share the same set of qualities with the organization and with their coworkers perform better and stay at the company longer. Check out our open positions.
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