 What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another video. Today we're going to be talking about hard skills versus soft skills to see which one is more important. Now just so we're all on the same page, hard skills refers to the technical skills or the job-related knowledge that you need in order to perform your job. So it's not just knowing a skill like SQL or Excel or Tableau, it's knowing how to use those. So data cleaning, data manipulation, data collection, data visualization, all those things. On the other hand, soft skills are things like your personal traits and characteristics, things that make you you. These are things that are often linked to your personality, so things like your communication style, how driven you are, your critical thinking skills, and things like that. Now that we're all on the same page, I want to take a step back and give you some context to why I'm making this video. Now to the shock of many of you, and I've talked to a lot of people about this, is I would actually consider myself a lot more of an introvert than an extrovert. So when I got into data analytics, I had this idea that I would mostly be on my computer kind of working in my own silo, and I absolutely loved that. I was super excited to just be able to work on a computer and just kind of recharge, because that's how introverts work. We kind of recharge one more by ourselves. And that is not exactly how I would say my career has ended up. I genuinely thought I really just needed to know the technical skills in order to be a good data analyst. And so I think I had some pretty unrealistic expectations when I was first starting out as a data analyst. So this video is to help you understand the hard skills versus the technical skills and see where they are very important in the workplace. So let's start off with talking about hard skills. I'm not going to break it up into two sections. One is actually getting a job and then when you actually have the job. So when you're getting a job, hard skills are extremely important. You can have the best personality in the world and you will never get an interview if you don't have the hard skills. So if you don't have things like SQL or Excel or Power BI, whatever that data analyst job is hiring for, if you don't have those hard skills, you're not going to get an interview. Now, once you actually land an interview, you're face to face with a hiring manager and they're asking you about these things, your soft skills do play a much bigger part because then they're wanting to get to know a little bit more about you, how you work, how good of a culture fit you're going to be, as well as, you know, make sure you actually know these technical skills. Now, which one is more important when you're actually trying to get a job? Is it the hard skills or the soft skills? Here are my genuine thoughts on this and you may or may not agree, but these are my genuine thoughts. I think that hard skills are more important when you're trying to get a job. You may just have a lackluster personality. You may not be super outgoing. You may not have the biggest smile or tell the best stories or be the best communicator in the world, but you can absolutely still get a job if you have good technical skills. I can't say I'm as positive for the other way around. I myself was in that exact place. I had a pretty good personality, but I would say that my technical skills were kind of lacking, but I kind of just got lucky and somebody took a chance on me and that happens. But if I had really good technical skills and my personality was not as good, I most likely would have been hired a lot faster. So in my opinion, hard skills are about 65 or 75 percent of getting a job when you're first starting out. So now let's talk about when you're actually working in the job because getting a job can take several months or even up to a year, but you can be working in that job for three, five, or even 10 years. Now, this is the part that really shocked me when I got my first data analyst job because I thought they would take a few weeks to train me and then they would just give me work and I would do it all by myself. And I was really looking forward to that because previously I had a very, very draining job where I was talking to people all day and I kind of was hoping that wasn't the case. But to my dismay, I learned that the real work is super involved. You need to be able to communicate with a lot of different people. Now in every single data related job that I've had, we'll have daily meetups. You'll be working with non-technical teams, technical teams, stakeholders, clients, and then just internally so you meet with your team to make sure that you can get the work done in the time frame that you've been given. And that just blew my mind. I was like, how can you have so many meetings about so many things? When are you going to get your work done? So I personally had to learn a lot of soft skills when I first started out like time management and how to communicate to different teams and different people, like technical versus non-technical. I kind of had to learn how to communicate with those people. So these soft skills became extremely important when I actually got my first job. Another thing about working on a team and I think this surprises a lot of people is that you really need to work with these other people on your team to get your work done. So you can't just do everything yourself. Sometimes you're going to have to go to a data engineer because data isn't coming in properly and you'll have to work through that or you'll have to go to your manager and say, hey, I'm having trouble communicating with this client because they're not emailing me back. What would you like me to do? I think that's what shocks a lot of people. You rely on a lot of different people, a lot of different teams in order to just get your work done. So you really have to work on and maintain professional relationships when you're at work. You have to make sure that that data engineer that you're working with isn't pissed off at you because you didn't get them something or you didn't do something or you weren't communicating with them. You have to make sure that you maintain those relationships because honestly, if you don't and all those relationships start to fail, you're not going to be able to get your work done. Again, I'm just putting a lot of emphasis on this because there's so many people who don't realize how much work it takes just to maintain those relationships and communicate and really work with other people in a tech job. It's just so much more involved than you think. So soft skills in the workplace are extremely important and so are hard skills. You absolutely need to know how to actually do your job when you get your work. So a lot of the hard skills that I was working with when I was a data analyst was along the data collection side of things. So I was doing a lot of data collection, a lot of data transformation, a lot of data cleaning as well. With all those things, I was using software like Azure and Microsoft SQL server, MySQL, Excel, Python. I was using mostly software, but of course, hardware as well in order to get that work done. So knowing the hard skill itself is really important. You can have it on your resume, you've learned it, you've taken a bunch of courses, but now you're actually in the job and you need to know how to implement those hard skills. That's where you'll learn just a lot of that on the job. So you'll work with all these different teams, you'll see how the data flows and how it's clean and visualized and used in products and you'll learn these things as you go along. Even though I just put a lot of emphasis on soft skills, I still believe that hard skills are more important when you're in the workplace. It's really close though. I'd give hard skills a 55 or a 60% split with the soft skills because hard skills are how you actually get your work done. And that's where you spend most of your time. It depends on the week though, because some weeks it may be the soft skills are a little bit more important because you have a lot of meetings. But in general, I would just say that you have to know how to do your work by yourself and then working with other teams to get your job done is just a really important part as well, but I would say slightly less important. This is why I think you see a lot of really intelligent people who are super good at the hard skills do really well in their careers, even though they don't have all of the soft skills. They may just be okay with communication and problem solving and all those other soft skills, but they're super good with the technical skills and they can go really far in their career. Now, this is one of the last things that I wanted to mention with hard skills versus soft skills is that certain jobs require more hard skills than soft skills and vice versa. For example, I became a manager and honestly, it was mostly soft skills. I almost was doing no coding. I would help people, you know, I would say, okay, here's where your mistakes are. So I do a little bit of QA, high level hard skills, but most of my job became soft skills. So those hard skills and those soft skills helped me get to the manager position. But when I actually got there was mostly soft skills and a lot of it was just delegating and making sure that they were getting the work done. And it wasn't me actually using my hard skills to make sure that things were getting done on time. So that's just one example. And that's kind of where my career took me. But I could have gone down the path of a senior or a technical lead analyst, but I didn't do that. And that probably would have been a lot more heavy on the technical side rather than the soft skills. Now, you may or may not agree, everybody has a different perspective on this. I personally think that hard skills and technical skills are a little bit more important than the soft skills. But of course, if you have terrible soft skills, it's gonna make it really, really difficult when you're actually in the job. So I hope this helped with just having more realistic expectations. I know myself, I just had really bad expectations. I didn't have anybody ever talked to me about this. And so my expectation was it was mostly hard skills. And I didn't prep or I was not mentally prepared for all the soft skills that were needed. And I built those up over the years. So if you're more like me, don't worry, you can kind of build those skills up over time. I used to get exhausted of just being around people and using soft skills after about like an hour or two. Now I can go almost a full day. It was definitely a genuine skill that I had to learn. That's just not what I used to do. That's not what I was used to. And so, you know, if you were like me, and that is really difficult for you, and you don't have those soft skills, those are things that you can learn just like a hard skill, you can learn to be more outgoing, you can learn to communicate more effectively. These are things that you can work on, they just take time and takes practice. And so don't give up on this career because you don't have soft skills, or you're not super outgoing, or you don't have, you know, a great personality or however you want to characterize yourself. Don't give up on it just because it's difficult or it's tough for you right now. That's absolutely something that you can work to and get better at. So with that being said, I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, be sure to like and subscribe below, and I will see you in the next video.