6 Questions to Ask When Selecting Soft Skills Training Topics for Your Team

Your team is the face of your organization. Training and developing their soft skills can help give you an edge on your competition. Regardless of department or role, soft skills competency matters. From business basics, communication, and interpersonal skills to sales and customer service, soft skills are used every day. Well-developed soft skills can be the difference between good and great employees.

According to LinkedIn, the five most in-demand soft skills for 2020 are:[i]

• Creativity
• Persuasion
• Collaboration
• Adaptability
• Emotional Intelligence

Choosing the Right Soft Skills for Your Team

Selecting and prioritizing soft skills training topics can be overwhelming because there are so many options. There are a lot of great off-the-shelf options that can be delivered in a variety of modalities. Choosing the right method for soft skills training like ILT or VILT can help improve the effectiveness of the training. Soft skills are all about people and training on soft skills requires human contact to be most effective. Even if the training isn’t focused on communication or interpersonal skills, simply being in a room (physically or virtually) with other people helps grow and develop those skills. Using ILT or VILT for soft skills training can be more effective at keeping learners engaged, building stronger connections, and encouraging collaboration.

If you need a more tailored solution, it can be helpful to evaluate your team prior to training so you can create a custom curriculum that meets their unique soft skills development needs. Depending on your situation, a learning strategist can help with the evaluation and analysis of your team. Before getting started, it can be useful to assess your team’s soft skills.

We’ve outlined 6 key questions to ask yourself and your team when selecting soft skills training topics:

• Which soft skills would you like to target and why?
• How can you break those down into specific behaviors?
• What data do you have on these behaviors in your organization?
• What does this data tell you about your organization’s soft skills training needs?
• What does your selection of training topics say about your organization’s values?
• How does your selection differentiate your organization from the competition?

Understanding, identifying, and developing the most effective soft skills for your team is one of the most important things you can do for your organization. Growing your employees’ professional skills is critical to helping them integrate and be successful in today’s work environment. Crafting an effective soft skills solution unique to your team consists of three main pillars:

1. Commit – Commit to developing your organization’s and team’s soft skills.
2. Plan – Create a soft skills training plan for your team.
3. Invest – Invest your time and resources to put your soft skills training plan into action.

To find out more about how TTA can help you with your unique training needs, contact us today.

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[i] https://learning.linkedin.com/blog/learning-thought-leadership/most-in-demand-skills-2020#:~:text=The%20top%20soft%20skills%20are%20more%20human%2Dcentric%20than%20last%20year&text=Topping%20this%20year’s%20list%20are,new%20ideas%20to%20the%20table