The Writer’s Coin

Brip Blap had a nice post the other day (actually written by Patrick at Cash Money Life) about “soft skills.” It’s a great post and I think it’s a great read, but the cynical part of me immediately thought one thing: “It doesn’t matter what you do if the people in charge don’t value these skills.”

And a lot of bosses out there go by one thing and one thing only: degrees and names. What school did you go to? What is your degree in? Who did you work for before? What big names are you associated with? They don’t look at who you are and what you can do, they look at your paperwork. Which is a mistake in two different ways. For one, you may have skills that aren’t reflected in your “documents.” Lets say you are a social-networking maven in your spare time but it’s reflected nowhere in your resume. For a lot of employers, that means it doesn’t exist. The other way it’s bad is that a person could be inept at something but have a degree in it (this is VERY common). Now they will be the de facto “go to” person on that subject because they have the degree.

This is how mediocre people manage to coast through a job without really contributing anything.

I have no illusions about changing the world and I’m not crying about this being “unfair.” I’m just saying that we should be aware of it and add another crucial component to our “soft skills” set of tools: boss management.

It means being able to prove to your company and your boss (somehow) that you can do these things you don’t necessarily have a degree in. Your other option, of course, is to simply get a certification in whatever it is you already know. I, of course, am a bigger fan of the second. Why? Fight the power! That’s why.

[by the way, that's my college degree at the top, nicely rolled up in a tube]

Tags: degrees, Jobs, soft skills