Episode: 714

Episode Title: Are You A Problem-Solver?

Compared to soft skills, tech skills are easy to teach. Next on The Perna Syndicate, that’s why workers who bring soft skills to the table have a distinct advantage.

Ep 714 show:

This is The Perna Syndicate—hello and welcome! The tech skills gap is challenging employers to find workers who have more than just the ability to code. In today’s ever-changing labor market, tech workers have to bring more to the table. And that’s where soft skills come in. 

According to a recent study by the ManpowerGroup, tech employers are looking for five key professional skills in the people they hire. We’ve talked about creativity, critical thinking, and leadership already this week. Today, it’s all about the fourth skill: reasoning and problem solving. 

The ability to reason is closely linked to critical thinking, and they both require a certain level of mental acuity. To be a reasoning person, you must be able to put two and two together and come up with the right answer. This is problem solving in its most basic form. 

Technology solves a lot of problems, and it can be easy to just let it do that for us all the time. But we have to retain this ability to reason things out for ourselves and troubleshoot the challenges that come our way. There’s a measure of self-reliance that comes with the ability to reason and problem-solve in our everyday life. 

Professional skills like reasoning are notoriously hard to teach. You can learn to code without grasping the logical thinking or reasoning skills that allow you to apply your technical smarts wisely. 

Workers who come to the role already possessing these abilities have a distinct edge in today’s job market. Technical skills are the how, but professional skills are often the why.

Join me tomorrow for one last professional skill that we should all strive to develop. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you next time on The Perna Syndicate!