What is Soft Skills Training?
What is the difference between qualifications and Soft Skills Training? There are “hard skills”, which most people know as “qualifications” and which cost a great deal to earn through universities or other registered training organisations. These include degrees, diplomas and trade certificates and are valuable to ensure the technical competency of the person you are retaining to solve your problem.
Soft Skills Training is different, in that it wraps all the hard skills and qualifications and teaches this highly qualified person to be better all round, a better communicator, problem solver, creative thinker, team player and when necessary, a team leader. Soft skills training is how to extract the utmost performance and results from all the qualifications your people have, by getting them to work and perform together as a precision unit, a well oiled machine, whilst respecting the individual contributions that each and every person makes. Whilst generating this incredible level of results though, it also creates and maintains a wonderful level of harmony and enjoyment for those people responsible for the results.
In short, soft skills training creates and maintains happy, satisfied and high performing workplaces that succeed despite setbacks and challenges to set the benchmarks within their industry for success!
Qualifications ensure that a minimum benchmark of competence has been established by the person with the qualification. That is vital – you want to know that every person in your team has the ability to perform to at least the benchmark standard. However, you expect more than the minimum standard of performance.
Soft Skills Training philosophy accepts that while qualifications are a fixed standard, performance varies according to the attitude and emotions of the person. These attitudes and emotions can vary greatly through any working day and are subject to external forces that impact greatly on an individual and a team. Soft skills training provides the resilience and capability to manage these emotional shifts within the individual and the team to minimize negative external influences. It enables the person and the team to rise to the challenge and synergistically create results that are beyond expectations, regardless of the environment.
How does Soft Skills Training work?
The first thing to understand is that emotions, the single most critical factor in determining performance, follow the laws of physics, for practical purposes. They are always there, can’t be switched on or off or created nor destroyed. They are there, at some level, all the time. They can be changed, influenced from within or externally, set in motion or slowed down by those forces external to them, and they are also linear. Whilst sometimes they might seems to jump from one to another – such as from happy to angry, there is actually a progression through a whole range of emotions up or down a scale.
In the image above, you can see the range of emotions available to the individual down the side, and the range where most people function in an average day. You can also see that reflected in the faces of people on any busy street – just look at their expressions!
However, there is a dividing line at the level of Boredom. It separates constructive emotions, attitude and behaviour above it, from destructive emotions, attitudes and behaviours below it.
Soft Skills Training is all about teaching people how to not only stay above this line consciously, but to influence those in their teams and the people they deal with, to operate “above the line” at all times also. It takes work, and resilience and a certain level of skill and a lot of practice and patience, but that is what Soft Skills Training provides. It is the personal and professional development of the individual, as a key and influential member of a team and community, that provides the high performance you want, need and expect from your people and teams, and from yourself.
What are the indicators that your people might need Soft Skills Training?
There are a few, fundamental issues and indicators that suggest that Soft Skills Training might be the answer to your challenges:
- Customer feedback suggesting room to improve customer service standards
- Conflict amongst the team at work
- You recently merged with or took over another company and are trying to integrate the teams and their individual cultures into one aligned company
- The workplace doesn’t ‘buzz’ anymore
- Profits are down for no apparent reason, but critically, it doesn’t seem a priority for anyone
- Increase in the number of staff days off, for whatever reason
- Productivity decline
- A series of internal promotions
- Significant operational changes in your business
- A new product or product range launch
- Any restructure of the company or operations
Each of these on their own might not mean anything, as there could be genuine reasons for any of them unrelated to a Soft Skills Training need. However, they often travel in company – it’s unusual to find just one of these issues without others hidden or underlying.
Companies and even industries change and evolve over time and it is our responsibility to evolve and reinvent ourselves to move with the times. The challenge can be that not everyone is keen to move forward at the same time. Those who choose not to, tend to get left behind. However, companies that choose not to evolve and equip their teams with all the necessary Soft Skills Training condemn their staff to a slow and gradual demise in their employment and their quality of life.
What is involved in Soft Skills Training?
The first step is to accept that Soft Skills Training has the potential to greatly enhance the performance of your company AND your people, as individuals, and as a team.
The next step is to find someone who can deliver the Soft Skills Training that your team needs, in the way that will work best for them.
An analysis of your workplace for training needs, discussions with you and other management and the people themselves will soon ascertain where the shortfalls in training needs are, and it’s a matter then of creating the training programs that will deliver the results required.
Soft Skills Training, as delivered by Ray Jamieson, is a combination of established practices in areas of team building, leadership, communication skills, conflict resolution and so much more, packed in an Accelerated Learning Format, to ensure that the lessons learnt are immediately accessable and available to the people when their situation requires it.
Learning the training lesson isn’t the issue – it’s the recall!
What is most important is the ability to recall the training when it is needed and that is where Accelerated Learning delivery of Soft Skills Training shines.
Programs are packaged as experiential learning courses, with NLP influences underpinning critical communication areas, and with visual, auditory and kinesthetic stimuli and left/right brain learning exercises to ensure the every lesson and every session is absorbed and learnt through the most relevant learning modality for each person. The Accelerated Learning delivery ensures they can recall it in an instant, when they need it!
Learn to deliver Soft Skills Training professionally!
Are you a teacher, trainer, counselor or coach?
Do you want to learn to deliver your existing training content in a way that empowers your groups far more than you ever thought possible, giving them virtually permanent instant recall of your lessons and making your training sessions so much more fun?
Your Soft Skills Training Specialist
Ray Jamieson, your Soft Skills Training Specialist
Ray Jamieson has been acknowledged as a Soft Skills Training specialist for many years, delivering Soft Skills Training in the mid 1990s for clients such as Queensland Transport and Main Roads Department and other corporates, then through the Executive Mastermind in the following decade.
The experiences and knowledge gained from training with the masters in many fields related to Soft Skills, such as NLP, Advanced Presentation Skills Training, Accelerated Learning, Voice Dialogue and Sub-Personalities have consolidated him as preeminent in his field. To view his mentors in these areas, look at the Rogues Gallery of Mentors on this link. See the familiar faces of Blair Singer, Michael Rowland, Robert Kiyosaki and many more!
To contact Ray Jamieson, send him a message at this Contact Form.