EPISODE 027 - Career: What is more important, soft skills or hard skills?

Michael Seidl: Welcome to a new episode of the get shit done in IT podcast My name is Michael Seidel and and our topic of the day is what is better hard skills or soft skills? I hope the sound is okay today because I'm Once more in a different location. I'm sitting in my car right now. So I'm on my way To to an apartment and do the podcast in the meantime. No worries. I'm parking in the car at a nice spot so I'm not driving. And so back to the topic, what is better hard skills or soft skills? And to explain the differences, before I tried to explain it with my words and just prepared some official declaration and I'm just reading those lines. So hard skills. or technical skills are learned through education or hands-on experience. These are concrete, measurable abilities that are often specific to a job. You can demonstrate your proficiency and hard skills through relevant certifications, portfolios, skill assessment tests, and completed work. Very, very difficult, but my words will be what you learned. The real stuff you learned, you learned in school, you learned at university, you learned in your life, in your job. So those things you really learned and you have experience with. And the soft skills, the official declaration. Soft skills are non-technical skills that describe how you work and interact with others. Unlike hard skills, are not necessarily something you will learn in a course. like data analytics or programming skills. Instead, there's something you often build through experience. So my declaration or my meaning would be your character, your mindset, your behavior, how you act with other people in specific situations. So as we now have the declaration or definition of hard and soft skills, I just want to show some examples and maybe what I think

Michael Seidl: what fits better, what is better. Maybe one example is if you go to a doctor, what do you think? What would you prefer? Soft skills or hard skills? So if you have a broken arm or a broken leg or something like this, would you have more like someone who is maybe not very knowledgeable but who is very nice and welcoming you and everything will be good but the hard skills are not so good or would you prefer someone who knows his job, who knows what to do and fix you in a short time and everything will go well compared to maybe he's not the nicest person. So to be honest I would prefer the second one because if I have a broken leg or broken arm I want that to be fixed without any things going on afterwards. So in this case, I definitely prefer the hard skills. When we go back to IT and maybe to hire some people and find the correct people, there might be two different scenarios in my opinion. So if you look for someone who helps you immediately, who knows what to do, who help you, who can take the task, the project, the doings without any education time or something like this, then I think the hard skill will definitely fit that best. Because soft skill, you have to teach the knowledge, the doings, because that takes time. So the hard skill in that case would definitely be beneficial. If you look for someone who is maybe not doesn't know everything, but is has the skill or the ability or the mindset to learn to dig into a topic to dive into a topic to learn to to enhance his his knowledge is his future and everything. And it doesn't matter

Michael Seidl: exactly what hard skill he has, then I think the best is to go with a soft skill person. Maybe one example is, of course, if you need someone who is helping you immediately, then the hard skill definitely will win. But when these people don't have the soft skill of evolving, of changing, of doing anything different in the future, because when I see my career, my past 20, 25 years where I'm in the job or in the business out of school. Today I definitely do something different than 10 years ago. I do something different like 20 years ago and I definitely will do something different in 10 years. I will probably be at the automation stuff but the job or what I do or how I do it will be different. And if I have, if my smart, my soft skills or my mindset is very low or maybe focused on a specific stuff I want to do for the rest of my life, then it might be hard to survive. There might be a place for, maybe you know it, IS 400, that's a very old fashioned IBM software. 20, 30 years ago, a lot of usage of those people, but right now, it's really decreasing. So if you're at RS400, you might get a work, but it's not so easy. But if you have a mindset or soft skill of evolving and learning something new, then you go with SAP, you go with, I don't know, ServiceNow, Giro, any other software. If your mindset, your soft skill is, I learned something, I evolve, I want to be good in something new, then the technology is secondary. So you just get new hard skills, but your soft skills need to be set on that target that you want to do something new, you maybe like to do something new, you don't want to stay at one topic. So that's one thing. And with that said,

Michael Seidl: It really depends on the need and people you're looking for. So if you look for someone who is really helping you immediately, take go for the hard skill. But don't underestimate the soft skill as well. So you still have to do, you still have to work with those people. Your business will change. So the hard skill might help you immediately. But I think the soft skill is, or the soft skill people are those people who will help you in the longer distance and will help you and go with you on a change on a different topic on a different phase when it comes challenging and so on. So those people will definitely or in my opinion help you more when you go with the soft skill people than more than the hard skill. So in my opinion and when I see my business there is So we do really, we are really focused on IT infrastructure automation, IT automation and a little bit left and right and beyond those borders. But we are in the automation business. We are no other consultants, no Asia, automation in the Microsoft way. That's what we do. And there are not so many people out there. So if I just looking for hard skilled people, I will definitely fail or it will be very hard for me to get new people to hire new employees because there is no market out there for those people. So I decided I go for soft skilled people, of course with an IT background, but maybe from a different vendor, from a different area, from a different scripting language, whatever. but he has the soft skill to learn something new, to be interested, to be focused, then I definitely will go with the soft skill people, because I can teach them what we do here at Automator, for example. The hard skill people, I will definitely have a problem to get new hires, okay? And that's the reason.

Michael Seidl: Also, when I would find someone who is really focused on that, what we do, but the soft skill parameters do not fit, I think I might skip that candidate. Because for me, in my opinion, the soft skills are more valuable than the hard skills. But of course, it depends what you think and in your area, whatever. But let me know what you think and maybe you have a different point of view in that case. So that's the end of the podcast. One more thing, because this is I think the 25th or 26th episode. I really want to ask you to if the podcast is helpful for you, if you like it, if you enjoy it, help me to spread the word and to target other people and to send the podcast to other people so please like it, please give it a rating on, I don't know, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to it. Share it in the social media and help me to find more IT people to help with that podcast, okay? So wish you a nice week, stay productive and bye-bye.