What are soft skills and how can they help you in life and work?

Liz Makin Author

Oct 13, 2025 |

Have you ever wondered what soft skills are and how they can help you in life and work?

What are soft skills?

Soft skills are the personal qualities that help you thrive in life and in the workplace. They are the behavioural and interpersonal skills that relate to how effectively you interact with others and handle everyday life and specific situations.

Soft skills are also known as power, durable or life skills.

Soft skills consist of a combination of people, social, and communication skills, character traits, attitudes and mindsets, as well as social and emotional characteristics. They also include attributes and personality traits that help employees interact with others and succeed in the workplace, as well as helping you in your personal life too.

Soft skills are typically interpersonal people skills or desirable personality traits that revolve around character, teamwork, communication, time management and work ethic.

Soft skills can include social graces, communication and language skills, personal habits, cognitive or emotional empathy, time management, teamwork and leadership traits.

Examples of soft skills include the ability to communicate with others, to lead a team, to be confident and assertive, to solve problems and to get something done on time.

How can soft skills help you in life and work?

Soft skills such as communication are used in all relationships, whether these be with your friends, your partner, your children, contractors doing work on your house or your colleagues at work.

Soft skills are used every day at work and in life and developing these soft skills will help you in many areas including being part of a team, handling change and unexpected events and delivering projects effectively and on time. Soft skills will help you meet your work targets, gain promotion and in leading and managing others. 

On the other hand, a lack of soft skills can limit your potential, or even be the downfall of your business.

Soft skills also benefit organisations overall when they are practised on an organisation wide basis, for example, efficiency and output will improve when employees collaborate by sharing knowledge and tools to get jobs done, trust develops through positive interactions and relationships and productivity increases in environments where soft skills flourish.

What are hard skills?

Hard skills refer to the specific knowledge and abilities that you need to perform your job effectively or to complete a task. Hard skills are the measurable skills acquired through training, education, and practice.

Hard skills are those talents and abilities that can be measured. They are usually specific to a particular job, and they can be learned through schooling or on the job training.

Examples of hard skills include technical, computer, marketing, project management and analytical skills. If you are being more specific, computer skills may include areas such as Java Script, machine learning and data mining.

What skills do you need for success in life and work?

For success in life and work you will need a good combination of both hard and soft skills.

Do you want to learn more about soft skills?

If you want to learn more about soft skills why not take our online soft skills course 

Soft Skills for life & work: develop yourself for success

Through this course you will gain an insight into the essential soft skills and how you can use them, look at your own soft skills and identify the areas where you want to improve, be given a range of soft skills tools, tips and strategies to use for personal development and success in your life and at work and create a personalised soft skills action plan to develop your soft skills going forward.

Alternatively you could take one of our other personal development online courses.

Categories: : Life, Personal development, Soft skills, Work