IT is important to know the difference between the Soft Skills and the Hard Skills before we proceed further. I will give an example of a Desktop Computer it has got three components namely Monitor, Keyboard and CPU (Central Processing Unit); it is called Hardware and it would be a piece of metal doing nothing unless and until we incorporate a software which is Excel, Outlook, Games etc. which would allow the computer to do what it is supposed to do.
The above is typical and a practical example as to how Hardware & Software are interconnected and linked to each other. Likewise it is imperative that Hard & Soft skills are put to use together in order to be successful at our workplace and in our daily private life.
Hard Skill is an individual skill of a person which can be measured by any yardstick; for example, someone has done Masters in Mechanical Engineering or someone has done PhD in Psychology; it would be defined as Hard Skill or Someone is good in Mathematical Computation or someone is good in making an excel sheet then it would be described as Hard Skill. The Soft skill is something when someone interacts at his/her workplace, then things like Leadership, Motivation, Analytical Skills, Problem solving skills, Dispute resolution skills fall under Soft Skills and it can be defined as an emotional intelligence .
Generally speaking, we, as a nation, lack in Soft Skills due to which we are not focused on our job, we lose interest in our job and tend to leave the job. We don’t take correct decisions in a given timeline which overall impacts the performance or reputation of an organization.
I will now share one example of my past workplace which would be very beneficial. I was working as a Facility Manager of a High rise Business Office Towers in Dubai in 2010 and one day One Office Manager (female) called me to inform that a bunch of magazines had gone missing at her office entrance and I told her that I would get back to her before the close of business hours. I called the Housekeeping Supervisor to get all the 20 numbers of Cleaners at a given place in the building parking area to assemble and I addressed them in Hindi/Urdu as the majority was from India. I asked them that two types of people were not allowed in the building to go round the floors: Job seekers and restaurant vendors etc.
I informed them that a bunch of magazines had gone missing and either it had been taken by a job seeker or someone from the nearby restaurant who was distributing leaflets. I made up a story that either of the two people came to the floor and he picked up the magazines and then thought it was of no use and he dumped inside a metallic red box mounted on the same floor wall.
Afterwards, I requested the cleaners to look for the magazines in the Metallic Fire Hose Reel Box and five minutes later one of the cleaners came up to me with the magazines that he found inside the red metallic box which contained the Fire Hose Reel & the Fire Extinguishers. I returned the magazines to the Office Manager and she was very happy to receive her magazines back in the shortest possible time.
—The writer is contributing columnist.
