Soft skills are a combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, character traits, attitudes, career attribute, social intelligence and emotional intelligence quotients among others that enable people to navigate their environment, work well with others, perform well, and achieve their goals with complementing hard skills. The Collins English Dictionary defines the term "soft skills" as "desirable qualities for certain forms of employment that do not depend on acquired knowledge: they include common sense, the ability to deal with people, and a positive flexible attitude."

Soft skills are the difference between adequate candidates and ideal candidates. In most competitive job markets, recruitment criteria do not stop at technical ability and specialist knowledge. Particularly with graduate schemes, recruiters will be looking for people who can become leaders, and leadership, itself, depends on several key soft skills.

Soft skills relate to how you work with others. Employers value soft skills because they enable people to function and thrive in teams and in organisations as a whole. A productive and healthy work environment depends on soft skills. If you've got these general skills, you'll enhance your marketability. Unlike hard skills, which can be proven and measured, soft skills are intangible and difficult to quantify.

Research from the Society for Human Resource Management found that employers actually care more about soft skills than they do technical abilities like reading comprehension and mathematics. “Soft skills are key to building relationships, gaining visibility, and creating more opportunities for advancement,” says Kathy Robinson, founder of Boston career-coaching firm TurningPoint.

According to Linkedin the job market is constantly shifting, but soft skills translate to every career. Of the 2,000 business leaders surveyed, 57% identified soft skills as the most important to them.