Nowadays, about 70% of employers say they are ready to recruit a marketing profile (junior) mainly based on soft skills, proving that know-how and interpersonal skills are no longer opposed. Soft and hard skills complement each other: they are ”what I know how to do” and ”how I do it”.
When many tasks in companies are being automated thanks to artificial intelligence, employers and managers are paying new attention to human skills and values. What are the most expected human soft skills in the marketing, digital and communication professions? In this article, we are going to introduce seven of them.
1- Autonomy
As a result of telecommuting, today’s employees have to develop their autonomy to a greater extent, in the same way as a freelancer. It’s about the personal organization. How do I manage to delimit professional and personal time, and how do I nurture a certain self-motivation daily basis? If I am a manager, it’s also about thinking about how to accompany my team members in these new challenges.
2- Flexibility
The last two years have called on marketers more than ever to deal with change, so much so that the societal and technological context has never ceased to evolve. The ability to deal with uncertainty and reversals of fortune is now essential to succeed in continuing to move forward with faith and confidence.
This constant instability also calls for certain reactionary flexibility: If changes are too numerous or too frequent, there may be an over-reaction to new situations. The issue is to keep some distance between what happens and our response by stopping and observing to make an informed decision. You have to work on your mental flexibility to accept the unexpected differently, maybe in astonishment, instead of under an automatically negative prism.
3- Self-promotion
With remote work, a new challenge for employees is to make visible what is now done remotely: show the work that has been done, let people know what is being done, what successes have been achieved, but also the difficulties that require support, both on an individual and collective level.
This can impact a request for promotion or even influence the allocation of budgets. That is to say, knowing how to present or pitch one’s achievements, whether formally or informally, to a manager or a management committee. It requires a mastery of one’s ideas to create a coherent narrative path and reasonable control of one’s emotions (stage fright, openness to criticism, etc.) to make one’s speech both clear and desirable and capture the attention of one’s audience.
4- Maintaining the link
With this social distancing that has almost become normal, maintaining the link with others is essential, as our brain is neuro-social, meaning that it needs contacts to remain aligned with who we are and energetic. Remote work can take up all the space, at the expense of rest, and human contact, where we are increasingly focused on performance, at the expense of the informal exchanges that usually take place in the corridors or at the company coffee machine.
It is therefore essential to keep in touch with others, keep up to date, maintain a climate of openness and trust between employees, and find internal support when needed. In recent months, retailers have maintained this relationship by strongly digitizing their communications and services to remain “close” to their customers.
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5- The creativity
Being creative is essential to propose new ideas, innovate and disrupt existing models. Still, it is important to take care of it and nourish it daily in a restrictive societal context. Creativity needs emptiness, space, and freedom, so it is so important to preserve periods of “nothing” of idleness; it is the famous good idea that comes when you are in the shower!
Therefore, do not hesitate to take breaks and find your resources (music, water, sport…). That’s how we can reconnect to our intuition and imagination, abilities that do not work well when we are tired. We have also observed a correlation between empathy and creativity, proof that putting oneself in the shoes of one’s team or one’s clients, within a “Customer Centric” approach, can improve the employee experience or the client experience.
6- Setting the wheels in motion
It is necessary to keep faith in a less deteriorated future in this context. This will make it possible to set oneself in motion and get one’s team on board with a positive vision of the future. Yet, it is not an innate ability. Faced with uncertainty, the routine is reassuring: we may be tempted to stay in our daily work and habits. At the same time, it is important to preserve and nourish our capacity for audacity and to dare new things.
Therefore, we must be wary of it, all the more so as it can be the source of cognitive biases such as the confirmation bias, where we take as true only what we think or what we experience. This dynamism is all the more facilitated thanks to digital technology, making it easier to take the first steps or implement the first building blocks of your project: create an account on TikTok, a blog, launch your business…
Moreover, you should not forget to continue training, i.e., taking care of your “hard skills” and thus your technical skills. No wonder then that the number of business start-ups reached a new record in 2021, with almost one million companies created (17.4% more than in 2020).
7- Critical thinking
Lastly, at a time of infobesity and fake news, it is essential to develop or maintain a critical mind: Once again, it is the ability to put some distance between the information that arrives and the one I choose to listen to, then to take the time to verify what is said to create my own opinion or to make a decision. Trends inspire retailers, but often without asking themselves the basic questions, namely how innovations allow them to offer a homogeneous brand experience.
