The aerospace & aviation industries are built on technical proficiency, knowledge, and experience. Take the role of a commercial pilot for instance. Piloting privileges are specific to aircraft categories and the technical abilities of flight crews are continuously tested by recurrent training.

When you spent a significant part of your career in the “technical proficiency” focused culture of the aviation industry, it is quite easy to overlook the hard value of soft skills.

Today, each job opening attracts hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Many of them have the exact same qualifications and level of experience. When it comes to choosing one candidate over another who is exactly alike in hard skills and experience, the employer must discriminate. 

So, how do employers decide who to hire? 

It all comes down to the right combination of hard and soft skills.

Soft Skills vs. Hard Skills

To put it simply, hard skills concern your ability to do a specific task, and soft skills are more about the way you carry out those tasks — how you adapt, collaborate, solve problems, and make decisions.

Hard skills are all about your specialized knowledge and technical abilities, such as accounting, legal expertise or software development. Hard skills are often easier to define and measure compared to soft skills.

Soft skills relate to the way you connect and interact with others. They include skills like emotional intelligence, adaptability and collaboration. They’re typically more difficult to measure, but they can also help you thrive in a variety of roles and industries.

In today’s job market, no matter which industry or sector you are in,you’ll need to possess more than just “hard” skills to differentiate yourself and land a role.

Executive (or Professional) presence is your unique combination of soft skills. Executive presence is about your ability to inspire confidence:

• Inspiring confidence in your subordinates that you’re the leader they want to follow,
• Inspiring confidence among peers that you’re capable and reliable and,
• Inspiring confidence among senior leaders that you have the potential for great achievements.

It’s what an employer uses to decide if you will be a good fit for the organization.

The most important soft skills (particularly post-crisis) are:

• Composure
• Gravitas
• Adaptability
• Resilience
• Awareness/Resonance
• Forward Thinking
• Humility

Let’s look at them one by one.

1. Composure

This is your ability to keep your emotions in check even in difficult situations. Employers are going to be looking for people who are not anxious, angry, emotional or overly stressed out. You need to appear emotionally solid and have a balanced and composed outlook. If you don’t, it will show and you will not get hired. This skill is relevant and important even in times of virtual interviews and assessments.

2. Gravitas

Gravitas entails confidence in your abilities and knowledge. This is the skill that wins other people’s trust and therefore allows you to influence them. Gravitas also means being able to handle difficult situations, to speak up when most people are afraid, and to actively listen when it’s easy to jump to conclusions.

These are telling signs that you can handle challenges with poise, and ultimately carry the message that you’re leadership material.

Another significant portion of gravitas is your ability to convey knowledge in a concise way. It’s when you can explore a subject in depth without resorting to long, complicated explanations.

3. Adaptability

Can you adapt to a changing environment such as work successfully from home? Remote working is now required for business continuity and soft skills that are important for working unsupervised, for example, effective time management, keeping lines of communication open and being productive while working on your own are critical.

Building on your ability to adapt to others and communicate with them is essential if you want to build good relationships and become a great leader.

4. Resilience

Resilience is the ability to handle challenges and bounce back from setbacks. As a leader, you must be able to remain balanced even in the face of resistance. If you do, your executive presence will shine through. Being resilient will not only make you remain confident in the face of controversy or criticism, but it will also help you stay true to your core values.

5. Awareness/Resonance

Awareness is a combination of self-awareness and awareness of others. Awareness or resonance relates to emotional intelligence—the ability to read other people’s signals and react appropriately to them.

It is also the ability to put yourself in the shoes of your interviewers to understand how they are feeling and how they are being impacted by the world around them and by you. You need to be able to read the mind-set of the business owner, the HR Manager, or the recruiter and show them you can relate to their issues and help them.

Showing vulnerability, demonstrating empathy, plus sharing your concerns shows awareness and creates resonance with your audience.

6. Forward Thinking

Over the past few months, employers have been under a lot of pressure to keep their business afloat. Somebody with the ability to see and identify future trends, opportunities, and customer needs will be highly sought after.

Also, a candidate who asks and has the mindset of “how can we make the most of the current situation and turn it into our advantage?” will be viewed favorably by businesses in all sectors.

Also, many organizations will decide to intentionally hire new blood into their organization because they want fresh ideas and perspectives. They’ll want people who can get the rest of the team think more creatively, strategically, and positively.

Ask yourself the question: how can I leverage my past learnings and experience and use them to make a positive impact on the future direction of the business I’m applying to?

7. Humility

Trying to convince your interviewers that you know it all and that you are a “jack of all trades” will only make you look desperate and aggressive. It’s important that you don’t act in an intellectually superior manner. You must have a balanced humility and you should not oversell yourself.

You have to be able to acknowledge at these meetings that you don’t have all the answers but you’re excited and grateful to be part of a team where you’ll figure it out together.

Remember, you are not being hired to reinvent the wheel but you’re there to come on a journey with your future team and make suggestions and leverage your previous experience.

How to Improve Your Soft Skills

Get feedback from others

The best way to achieve these skills is to gain awareness of personal strengths and weaknesses. Ask for feedback from others. If there are specific skills you excel in then you should capitalize on them. Use what you know and take advantage of it.

Look for a mentor or role model

Few people are born with presence. But you can get better, especially if you have someone to model the skill you’re looking to develop. Who would you like to model? Who inspires you as a leader? What makes them great leaders? How can they help you get from A to B?

Think about any potential skills gap you want to fill and how they can help you close those gaps. 

You may or may not know them personally, but start paying attention to how they present themselves. Hone your ability to pay attention to the little details that make a difference.

Also, when you first meet with them, make sure that you have a clear idea of what you want them to help you with. Don’t waste their time as they’re often busy and important people. Have a plan when seeking their advice rather than making them figure out what you need.

Get a coach

A coach can help you develop certain soft skills quickly and effectively because they tailor the learning process directly to you. Partnering with the right coach can have an invaluable impact on your success as a leader.

Take an online course

You can teach yourself practically anything online today, from hard skills like web development and marketing to soft skills like project management and negotiation.

Soft Skills Matter

More and more companies recruit for soft skills by incorporating structured interviews and situational judgment tests whereby the interviewer puts the candidate in a specific hypothetical scenario and asks how he or she would deal with it. Thus, your ability to identify your soft skills and give examples of them is a critical part of any job interview.

You can get familiar with the most common behavioral interview questions at https://www.themartec.com/insidelook/behavioral-interview-questions

Given that soft skills are in such high demand in the workplace, you should look to improve your social and soft skills through activities such as volunteering, leading a team or even by working on an open-source project with other people.