Jessica Howington* says there are eight skills everyone needs to succeed in their careers.
While technical skills and abilities are essential to career success, they are not the only things that matter.
Personality traits and social skills are equally important factors.
Though some aspects of our personalities are fixed, there are eight social skills we can learn and improve over time.
Mastering these skills can help us achieve career success in ways we never imagined.
The big five personality traits
Modern personality psychologists believe there are five big personality traits.
These broad categories are:
- Conscientiousness: how much impulse control you have and how self-directed you are.
- Openness: how open you are to trying new things and tackling new challenges.
- Agreeableness: how much empathy, interest, and concern you have in others.
- Emotional Stability (sometimes called Neuroticism): how you experience and handle stress.
- Extraversion: how introverted or extroverted you are.
These traits are found throughout people and cultures around the world.
As such, they have been researched over the last 100 or so years to determine how they impact our success at work and in life.
Though not absolute, how we express these traits can impact how successful we are in our careers, with conscientiousness being the most important predictor of job performance.
And while some researchers believe that these traits are unchangeable from birth, some people believe you can learn the skills that enhance these traits.
Eight essential skills for career success
What are the eight essential skills you can learn that can help you find career success?
- Self-regulation
When you self-regulate, you can successfully manage your emotions.
When there’s a challenging, taxing, or negative situation, you think through the situation and respond rationally instead of with a knee-jerk or emotional reaction.
- Growth mindset
When challenges and setbacks do happen, you greet them with open arms.
Those with a growth mindset believe these situations are an opportunity to learn and grow.
More importantly, those with a growth mindset believe in their ability to master the situation.
- Resilience
Failure happens to everyone.
But, those with resilience don’t mind when they fail.
They accept that something didn’t work and pivot to find a different solution to the problem or challenge they face.
- Passion
Being good at something makes it easier to do.
However, that’s often not reason enough to continue doing it. Passion is what drives you to succeed at whatever goal you set for yourself.
No matter how long it takes you to master something, your passion is what drives your forward until you achieve your goal.
- Empathy
The ability to empathise with others means you can put yourself in other’s shoes.
When you can say, “I understand your point of view,” and truly mean it, you can build rapport with clients and colleagues, which helps reduce tension.
- Conscientiousness
Conscientious people don’t assume they already know everything they need to know.
Instead, they make an effort to make sure that they do whatever it takes to know whatever it is they need to know.
- Openness to experience
You ask “how” and “why” in an effort to understand why things work or why things are done a certain way.
It’s not because you want to challenge or change things. It’s because you are genuinely excited about the prospect of learning something new.
- Social skills
Possessing social skills is more than being nice or friendly.
It’s about exercising and using your emotional intelligence to help bring the team together while focusing on the task at hand.
Build through practice
Mastering these eight skills will take some patience and practice.
But, over time, you can build up your skillset by:
- Being a better listener
- Not assuming
- Practicing self-care
More to success than the technical
Skills and abilities are, of course, important to success in anything.
But, emotional skills are just as important as technical skills.
And, just like technical skills, you can learn and improve your social and emotional skills with time and practice.
*Jessica Howington is a Content Manager for FlexJobs.
This article first appeared at flexjobs.com.
