17.1 Your Skill Set: Hard Skills & Soft Skills
Hard Skills as a Differentiator
As you navigate the job market, you are likely to come across material that references the terms “hard skills” and “soft skills.” While there is no universal way of delineating one from the other, we can generally say that the term ‘soft skills’ is often used in reference to interpersonal qualities. Hard skills, by contrast, are more easily measurable, and more tied to the knowledge that someone may need to do their job effectively.
As someone seeking to enter the job market, you can expect to be assessed on technical skills, along with your ability to explain your approach, insights, and the challenges that you encountered along the way. Therefore, both types of skills matter. If you possess strong soft skills, though, do not rely on these alone to carry you through the analytics hiring process.
For many managerial roles, it is okay to let others handle the details, and to stay focused on the big picture. If you are seeking to enter the field of analytics, though, we urge you not to start out with a managerial mindset – instead, learn the details. Know the different statistical distributions, and why they matter. Learn how to derive the model outputs. Study some help() functions to learn about the modules that you’re using in pandas and scikit-learn. Eventually, you may be promoted into a role where you don’t need to “sweat the small stuff,” as the saying goes. Right now, though, you don’t have that luxury.
To be clear, we are not being dismissive of soft skills. In fact, excellent interpersonal skills are often rarer and more needed (especially in management!) Soft skills could be a huge factor in predicting your success trajectory once inside an organization. Perhaps the hardest thing that you will ever do in your analytics career, though, is landing that first position.
If you are serious about breaking into the field of marketing analytics, we recommend that you take advantage of every opportunity to strengthen your core skill sets in statistics and coding. Stay curious, and keep digging deeper.
Oh, You Don’t Have It? Then Go Get It!
As noted above, not every hard skill listed in every job description is an absolute ‘must have’ for every applicant – so remember not to count yourself out from a position before you even try. That said, you may learn through a phone screen or first-round interview that a company truly does require familiarity with some particular programming language or software environment. If it’s simply the case that you lack that skill right now, then you have some choices:
- Give up on this position, and feel sorry for yourself;
- Give up on this position, and blame someone else;
- Acquire it through some dedicated self-study.
By now, you can probably guess which one of these options we think is best.
Learning new skills can be frustrating – we know this as much as anyone could, as we do it all the time. However, here’s an important bright side to consider: when adding new skills to your palette, the initial payoff is huge.
Let’s imagine, for instance, that you have never used Tableau. How far do you think you could get in 30 minutes? The answer might surprise you. In fact, a single, half-hour session spent truly dedicated to nearly any concept should be enough to demystify the thing itself.
Going from “Advanced Beginner” to “Intermediate” in just about any skill is hard. Going from “Intermediate” to “Expert” is even tougher. But going from “No, I’ve never used that before” to “Yes, I’ve played around with it and I have a general sense of how it works” is actually surprisingly fast and easy.
You may find yourself cycling through the self-learning process many times throughout your job search. As you do, you’ll develop your own personal tricks and shortcuts. You will, literally, become better at self-learning.