Head So far, we have shared a lot of relevant knowledge and skills needed to work at home, but we have not systematically talked about how to develop the skills to work at home? In today’s article, I have compiled 9 hard and soft skills for working at home. In addition to introducing why you need to learn these skills, I will also share with you how to develop these skills.
If you also want to start working from home, but don’t know what skills you need, how do you learn? Or you already work at home, but always feel that there is something wrong with your work, I believe this article will be very suitable for you.
Hard Skills VS Soft Skills
First, let’s distinguish between hard skills and soft skills.
Hard skills mainly refer to the professional ability in a certain field. They are necessary skills for this job. For example, engineers must understand programming languages, salesmen must understand sales skills, and being able to use certain software is also a hard skill. For example, graphic designers need to understand Can use drawing software, hard skills can be learned through training, and can also be evaluated, but it is also very likely that after leaving this job, hard skills will no longer be useful.
Soft skills are abilities that can be applied to all jobs. It is difficult to learn through training, and it is difficult to have quantitative standards. Most of them are accumulated from everyone’s experience. These skills are like interpersonal and communication skills. , thinking ability, etc.
As for which is more important? I personally think that soft skills are more important than hard skills. No matter what job you do, you will inevitably have to contact people . Even if you work at home, you still need to communicate with people through video and text. These processes will need to be used Soft skills, and hard skills affect almost only yourself, as long as you are proficient enough to produce results, basically there will be no problem.
As long as you spend some time learning hard skills, you can almost certainly learn them, and there are many opportunities to practice them, but soft skills will be affected by each person’s personality and experience. There is no standard answer, and you can only slowly find out by yourself. The time to explore is usually much longer than learning hard skills.
How to Build the Skills to Work From Home: Hard Skills
Next, I will share with you what hard skills and soft skills I think you must learn to work from home? How to cultivate? Let’s talk about hard skills first.
#1 Professional Abilities
Professional ability is the core skill you need to engage in a job. If you don’t learn it, you will basically not be competent for the job. Below are a few occupations and corresponding professional abilities for your reference. Of course, a job may require multiple professional abilities at the same time. ,vice versa.
- Interpreters: specific language skills
- Engineer: programming ability
- Accountants: knowledge related to financial reporting
- Designer: know how to use specific drawing software
- Editor: know how to use specific editing software
How to cultivate
Professional ability is the easiest to develop among all abilities in my opinion. There are courses available for almost all professional skills that are highly demanded by work, and there are also theme academies for specific fields, such as the Hexagonal Academy that specializes in tutorial languages .
What you have to do is to first investigate which specific skills are required for the job you want to do, and then find relevant courses for the skills to take. After you finish the course, you can make some finished products that the company will want to see for practice, such as an APP or Videos, organize them into a portfolio and present them to the company to prove that you have this professional skill and that you can start working immediately after entering the company. I believe it will be very convincing.
#2 Writing skills
Some people may think that writing is a professional ability that only writers need, but in fact, when working at home, most of the communication will be through letters and communication software. If you need to propose to the boss or write a proposal, you will need to be good at all of these Only with excellent writing skills can the communication be smooth and the proposal be accepted.
Good writing skills include the choice of words, the tone of the words, the logic of each sentence, and even whether the punctuation marks are used correctly. You don’t have to write long essays like a writer, every word must be gorgeous , The artistic conception is extraordinary, but at the very least, what you write must be ” understandable. ”
How to cultivate
First of all, you must read more. In addition to various extracurricular readings, see what other colleagues or seniors who you think have good writing or communication skills write and read.
A large part of writing depends on whether your thinking logic is clear, and a lot of reading can allow you to slowly develop this ability, such as observing which conjunctions others use, how the cause and effect of a thing are presented, And think about why use it this way?
The next step is to write more. You can simply share what you have learned and life thoughts in the community. This is also training your logical ability. The information should be clearly stated.
#3 Project Management Capabilities
I believe that everyone who has worked in the workplace has handled large and small projects. Even if you are not the main person in charge of the project, you must have experienced the implementation process of the project, but don’t think that project management is only in the company, or as a supervisor. Need to learn.
If ordinary people can also use the thinking of project management in their lives, they will find that many things will be handled much more clearly. Project management includes setting project goals, evaluating project risks, assigning each person to be responsible for the role, and what to complete within a certain period of time. etc.
How to cultivate
First go to the Internet to search what is project management, get a general understanding of the process of project management, and then find out the part that can be most applied to yourself or the project you are responsible for. If you are not currently in charge of any project, you can try to use the daily Supplies and traveling are treated as small projects as practice, and after getting familiar with the process, you can slowly operate larger projects.
Project management actually requires experience, because many accidents usually occur during the implementation of each project and require improvisation. Therefore, I would suggest that you give priority to developing project management thinking rather than project management theory.
#4 Ability to use digital tools
Now that everyone is working from home, they cannot use the physical tools provided by the company in the past. Everything has become online. In order to maintain the same work results, everyone must start learning to use digital tools to improve the efficiency of working at home. Zoey’s The team is all working remotely. Let me share with you what digital tools our team is currently using.
- File Management: Google Drive
- Communication software: FB Messenger
- Video conferencing: ZOOM
- Business communication: Gmail
- Project Management: Notion
Among them, Notion is the main tool used by our team. It has powerful functions. Except for email and video calls, which require specific tools, most of our collaborations are now carried out on Notion, and I recommend it to you.
How to cultivate
If you are born in the Internet generation, it should not be a problem for you except Notion, which takes a little time to get familiar with. You just need to find the right tool.
If you are an older person who is forced to step into working from home and using digital tools, I would suggest that you humbly ask young people you trust for advice, or spend some time on Google, watching videos and doing homework, or now There is no shortage of physical books that teach these operations, but beware of out-of-date publications.
How to develop skills for working from home: soft skills
#1 Ability to communicate online
Once you start working from home, when you encounter a problem, you can no longer turn your head or walk a few steps to find a colleague to discuss it. All communication is carried out online ” asynchronously “. If you send a message, you may not get a reply immediately, and it may take at least It takes one day or more to continue the work, and it will take more time to communicate.
At this time, it is very important whether the message you convey is accurate enough. Can you quickly cut to the point? Is the speech on point? Can you clearly propose a specific solution? These are the places that must be paid attention to when communicating online.
How to cultivate
One of the differences between online and physical communication is that you can prepare in advance . Whether you want to reply to the other party’s message or report to the boss, you can organize it carefully and give the most suitable answer after thinking about it. The preparation process can also be Check whether your expression is appropriate? Is the point clearly stated?
In addition, because text itself has no emotion, when communicating with text, remember to read the content you wrote several times to see if it makes you feel uncomfortable. If so, replace the text appropriately and write softly. It’s also a great way to improve your communication skills!
#2 The ability to manage time
After working from home, the boundary between work and life will become very blurred. You are working when others are working, and you are still working when others are eating, watching dramas, or traveling. It seems that things can never be finished. Tired at work. If you have this condition, it means that your time management is not very good.
How to cultivate
All the time of working at home is arranged by yourself. Although you are free, you must know how to arrange it. When arranging time management, whether you want to plan every day or every week, I think there are 3 things you must do :
- List all the things you have to do next
- Prioritize everything
- Do only the 3 most important things every day
Time management is really a big issue, everyone’s habits are different, but these 3 things are steps that I think any time management novice can start to implement immediately and see the effect quickly.
#3 Independent Problem Solving
Do you often encounter problems, and your first thought is to find someone to help you solve the problem, but the other party always tells you that you are not available? You don’t know how to deal with it, so you simply put the problem on hold, and the result is that it gets bigger and bigger, so big that it can’t be dealt with?
Everyone is very busy now, and they can’t solve their own problems, let alone help you solve problems, so you must develop the ability to solve problems independently so that you don’t often get stuck at work.
How to cultivate
Many people will not have the ability to solve problems, probably because you have family members to protect you from childhood, and there are people who will help you solve problems, so you have no experience in anything. When family members disappear from your work, you are left alone. When we face it, we naturally don’t know how to deal with it. Since we have no experience, we have to accumulate again, that is, start to accumulate confidence from small problems.
Next time you encounter any problem, try to solve it by yourself, you can use Google, watch a video, or use your own assumptions to solve it. If you succeed, you have accumulated experience and self-confidence, and then learn slowly to tackle bigger problems.
#4 Ability to Adapt to Change
The world has new knowledge, new technology, and new information every day. The world is changing too fast, and the shelf life of what we learn is getting shorter and shorter. At this time, we need to have the ability to adapt to changes. For example, the recent emergence of cryptocurrency, do you Can quickly learn relevant knowledge and try to apply new changes to existing work?
How to cultivate
First of all, we need to be able to know what is happening in the industry we are in. You can track the KOL account of this industry or authoritative media. It is best to track it at home and abroad. When you see it is particularly obvious, everyone When you are talking about something, that thing may be the future trend. You can start to study relevant materials, learn relevant knowledge, and think about how to adapt to this upcoming or ongoing change.
#5 Ability to teach yourself
The last one and I think the most important one is the ability of self-study, which covers almost all the things mentioned above. When you have the ability of self-study, basically you don’t have to worry about being eliminated by the times or not being able to find a job. Yes, you won’t feel anxious, because you know that you just need to learn, and you know that you will learn it.
Self-study can be roughly divided into 3 links, input, output and feedback. To learn a new skill, these 3 links are constantly circulating. First of all, you need to input a lot of relevant knowledge, whether it is reading books or taking classes. A lot of output, find a way to implement the knowledge you have learned, as for the ratio of input to output? I personally recommend about 3:7, or even 2:8.
After the output, you will definitely get some feedback, which may be discovered by yourself or given to you by others. You need to think about whether these feedbacks can help you learn this skill better, and continue to input insufficient knowledge. Output, then feedback, and then input, infinite loop.
Epilogue: How to develop skills for working from home? focus on accumulating
After reading these 9 essential skills for working at home, you may think: ” There are too many! So when I have to learn, I can’t finish learning at all .” Yes, skills are really endless, even if you A certain skill has been learned to a good level, but you still haven’t finished learning it, at most you have reached a relay station.
For me, learning new skills is a process of continuous accumulation, just like you want to buy an expensive luxury item, you will keep saving money until you have enough money to buy the product, we also need to accumulate skills to be free one day Work from home comfortably, but unlike spending money, these skills will not disappear. Even if you don’t want to work from home one day, these skills will still bring you great benefits in all aspects of your life.