2025-03-24 Professional Skills Matter

There’s a bunch of skills that are essentially valuable whatever your job, whatever your industry - hugely transferable, hugely important, all too frequently overlooked. Everything from communication, giving feedback, fixing small frictions, understanding problems, effective summarisation, meeting new people, and more.

Sometimes these get called “soft skills”. I hate this term - I think it contributes to them being undervalued. I like to call them professional skills because fundamentally I think they’re core to being any kind of professional in any domain.

“Technical skills” - skills specific to the given job (I don’t just mean “tech”) - are obviously important too. You want your teacher to be good at teaching, you want your salesperson to be good at selling.

But the two go hand in hand.

And professional skills, like technical skills, are things you can learn - cf. Meri Williams’ “Rejecting the Soft Skills Fairy” and similar. Yes there’s going to be people with different degrees of natural talent or who are starting from different baselines, but you can still practice and improve.

If your engineering/design/trading/whatever skills are off the chart, but you can’t effectively communicate your insights, or nobody can learn from you because you can’t give useful feedback, or nobody wants to work with you because you don’t collaborate well, then maybe you should look at working on those. They’ll be good for you in more than just the day-job.

And if you run an organisation, make sure professional skills feature in your career framework - I’m a fan of Circle CI’s Engineering Competency Matrix and the Dropbox Engineering Career Framework if you’re looking for inspiration.