Soft Skills for the Workplace is a nontraditional approach to learning basic employability skills needed in today's workplace. Well-developed soft skills help an individual find a job, perform well in the workplace, and gain personal success in life and career. By studying this text, you will learn the soft skills that employers recommend, and require, of employees. Learning how to interact professionally with customers, coworkers, and employers is one sure way to prepare for your future. In today's workplace, it is necessary to have job-specific skills to perform on the job as well as know-how to interact with coworkers and customers. You may be the most qualified person in your field in terms of hard skills, but if you lack soft skills, you may have a challenge finding and retaining employment. No matter your career choice, Soft Skills for the Workplace will help you help you jump-start your future. In today's competitive work environment, well-developed employability skills can help you stand out in the crowd Soft skills are the new hard skills for the 21st century.

What's the hard truth? Soft skills get little respect but will make or break your career. Master your soft skills and really get ahead at work! Fortune 500 coach Peggy Klaus encounters individuals every day who excel at their jobs but aren't getting where they want to go. It's rarely a shortfall in technical expertise that limits their careers, but rather a shortcoming in their social, communication, and self-management behaviors. In The Hard Truth About Soft Skills Klaus delivers practical tools and techniques for mastering soft skills across the career spectrum. She shows how to: manage your workload handle the critics develop and promote your personal brand navigate office politics lead the troops and much more! Klaus reveals why soft skills are often ignored, while bringing their importance to life in her trademark style—straightforward, humorous, and motivating. Perfect for readers at all professional stages—from those who are just starting out to seasoned executives—this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to take his or her career to the next level.

If you are ready to propel your career to the next level, if you are striving for both a successful career and a fulfilling life, Skills That Build provides the missing credential in your healthy success tool kit. Skills That Build is the intersection of science, business, and well-being, from the perspective of a seasoned management consultant and executive coach with an academic background in cognitive psychology. It offers readers an accessible means to coach themselves on skills in four critical areas, which promote psychological health and generate success both in the workplace and at home.​ Demand for leadership coaching has skyrocketed worldwide in the last five years, but few people can afford a professional coach. Even fewer receive coaching for career development and personal growth through their employer. Busy racking up buzzworthy credentials on their own time, today's emerging workers and mid-career professionals teeter precariously between personal and career aspirations. ​​ If ever there was a need for preventive mental health practices and accessible tools for workplace empowerment, the time is now. Just over a year ago, the workforce was focused on ascending the career ladder, with less attention paid to maintaining a healthy grip on personal well-being. Since then, the pandemic has underscored the need for resilience and effective ways to cope on both professional and personal fronts. While successful leaders build success from within, they must first lead themselves. This book becomes the virtual coach on the bookshelf, as readers learn and master career-advancing skills that promote psychological health and well-being. Anyone can learn these behaviors and enhance their current repertoire using this evidence-based guide for skills that build us.​ Through stories from coaching clients, groundbreaking scientific research, examples of business applications, and exercises to hone and master new behaviors, Skills That Build demonstrates actionable techniques and empowers readers to jump-start their uniquely personal strategies for growth.​ ​

This book is targeted to office professionals whether they are new, mid-career or late-career employees. What most new employees lack today are soft skills. Soft skills are not like hard skills, such as typing, writing, or how to use software programs which are more commonly taught. Often overlooked, soft skills such as fostering good interoffice relationships, implementing good communication strategies, practicing effective email communication, being aware of your nonverbal communication, developing a thorough work plan, and perfecting your time management skills are just as vital for career success. Mid-career and late-career employees, although successful in their careers, may have never learned more advanced soft skills such as developing meaningful relationships at work, maintaining a work life balance, being a leader in the workplace, and leaving a legacy. Readers of this book will gain a new understanding of not only the importance of soft skills in the workplace, but they will learn about effective strategies and practical examples that they can implement in their own workplace, to empower them to be successful in their job and develop deeper, more meaningful relationships with their colleagues.

Every manager has to deal with difficult employees. However, what separates the great managers is their ability to turn them into productive team players. Control freaks. Narcissists. Slackers. Cynics. Their outbursts, irrational demands, gripes, and countless other disruptions need to be dealt with, and you are the unlucky one with that job description. This book turns this seemingly difficult chore into a straight-forward process that gently, yet effectively, improves behaviors. It all begins with understanding a core truth: most people actually want to contribute results, not cause headaches. When the manager resets to that fundamental principle, the potential for change can reveal itself in even the most hopeless situations. Written by tech industry expert Alan Willett, Leading the Unleadable explains how to: Master the necessary mindset Explain the problem calmly in a short feedback session Get a commitment to change, then follow up Coach others to replicate the process Develop the situational awareness required to spot future trouble before it hits Are you a great manager? Of course you believe you are. So don’t just put up with your difficult employees. Anyone can do that. Turn them into the tremendous team players everyone wants them to be!

This accessible text looks at the range of soft skills sought after by employers and provides a practical guide to developing and effectively demonstrating these skills. Soft skills -- including communication, customer service, teamwork, problem solving, and personal management -- represent a major component of any worker's professional identity. This book analyzes major soft skills, including both inward-facing soft skills (how workers manage themselves to effectively perform their work) and outward-facing skills (how workers effectively interact with others and in groups). It explores how these skills are rooted in fundamental areas of liberal arts including interpersonal communication, psychology, and ethics. It provides an active learning pedagogy, including creative exercises and case studies through which students can assess their understanding of underlying concepts and their application in real-world situations. The book can be used as a supplement for communication, business, and career-oriented courses, and it will be of interest to individual students and junior professionals as well as career counselors, postsecondary instructors across the curriculum, and professionals in human resources and learning and development.

Solve the number one problem with today's young workforce—the soft skills gap The number one challenge with today's young talent is a problem hiding in plain sight: the ever-widening soft skills gap. Today's new, young workforce has so much to offer—new technical skills, new ideas, new perspective, new energy. Yet too many of them are held back because of their weak soft skills. Soft skills may be harder to define and measure than hard skills, but they are just as critical. People get hired because of their hard skills but get fired because of their soft skills. Setting a good example or simply telling young workers they need to improve isn't enough, nor is scolding them or pointing out their failings in an annual review. However you can teach the missing basics to today's young talent. Based on more than twenty years of research, Bruce Tulgan, renowned expert on the millennial workforce, offers concrete solutions to help managers teach the missing basics of professionalism, critical thinking, and followership—complete with ninety-two step-by-step lesson plans designed to be highly flexible and easy to use. Tulgan's research and proven approach has show that the key to teaching young people the missing soft skills lies in breaking down critical soft skills into their component parts, concentrating on one small component at a time, with the help of a teaching-style manager. Almost all of the exercises can be done in less than an hour within a team meeting or an extended one-on-one. The exercises are easily modified and customized and can be used as take-home exercises for any individual or group, to guide one-on-one discussions with direct-reports and in the classroom as written exercises or group discussions. Managers—and their young employees—will find themselves returning to their favorite exercises over and over again. One exercise at a time, managers will build up the most important soft skills of their new, young talent. These critical soft skills can make the difference between mediocre and good, between good and great, between great and one of a kind.