A career in programing requires both technical expertise and soft skills. But do you know what soft skills are that employers are actually seeking today? Which one should focus on mastering and keeps growing to support for your path career?
To help answer that question and narrow it down, we analyzed the top high valued soft skills for software developers. This knowledge can help you identify some soft skills that will help advance your career, especially in Vietnam software outsourcing companies.
Communication
As a developer, you need to be able to communicate effectively with clients, your supervisors, your colleagues…Great communication is critical for success as a software developer. Communicating with clients can prove to be tough, since they may be non-technical people. And while your colleagues have no trouble understanding some jargons, don’t assume your clients will too.
Good communicators know when to be brief, and when to go into detail and clearly convey their ideas to others. And the most important thing, they know how to accept and learn from constructive criticism from the others.
Teamwork
At some point in your career as a developer you are definitely going to be part of a team, not an individual. Developers usually need to collaborate with each other, that’s why poor interaction among these people can reduce the quality of any product in this industry.
Knowing what your colleagues do, and what their strengths and weaknesses are, can benefit you, especially when you are a team leader, you can able to assign tasks to right people in an efficiently way. Over time, it can be seen that energy of teamwork enhances the success of projects periodically.
Adaptability
This skill should be a nature to developers because there are always things to be changed and things to be learned. Adaptability refers to a software developer’s openness to learning new skills, taking on extra responsibilities, even relocating if you work for software outsourcing company. One of the most important aspect of adaptability is the reaction to change. You need to face and react positively to comments, criticism or other sort of uncomfortable situations.
Critical thinking
Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally, understanding the logical connection between ideas. Critical thinkers always seek to determine whether the ideas, arguments and findings represent the entire picture and are open to finding that they do not.
As a web developer you will sometimes be faced with several possible implementation methods to achieve the same outcome. Critical thinking will allow you to quickly analyze and test each method mentally, before deciding on the most efficient one.
You will definitely need to master this soft skill set to be success on your career path beside focus on improving certain of your hard skills. It is difficult, but never too late or impossible to improve your soft skills, and it helps if you see each soft skill as a collection of behaviors. Changing any of the behaviors, or habits, will result in either an improvement or a deterioration of the related skill.
