Soft Skills for Successful Career

Indian academia adds close to 3.5 million graduates and post-graduates every year; on the face of it, this does not seem to be a major challenge. However, a large number of these young professionals are not adequately equipped to face the highly competitive and very demanding corporate world of today. Most of their focus in the technology domain remains limited to working as a one-man army producing what they read, with little emphasis on application and creativity. Thus, there is a need to polish their skills with respect to disciplines like documentation, systematic processes and all round excellence. These problems are the symptoms of a lack of proper imparting of soft skills in aspiring students. This paper was written to articulate the importance of soft skills for successful career. ‘Soft skills’ is an abstract concept, which is, in fact, a compendium of several components like attitude, abilities, habits and practices that are combined adeptly to maximize one’s work effectiveness. They are much more than just a set of good habits or key abilities. Soft skills are about integrating the right proportion of these components into formidable skills and eventually transforming those skills into competencies