Soft skills are character skills that reflect how a person interacts and works with others. Teamwork, effective communication and creativity are examples of soft skills. There are no formal but many informal resources to improve these skills.
Soft skills help employees to be more valuable to an organization since they enable individuals to solve problems with others. These skills are very important personality traits that help entrepreneurs and coworkers to have better emotional control and become successful.
Hard skills (or technical skills) are critical and very important skills for any workplace. These skills are learned through formal education & training on specific topics. Engineering, computer programming or proficiency in different languages are typical examples. Hard skills are teachable and measurable. Hard skills, with the support of artificial intelligence (AI), which is rapidly changing the work environment, complete the defined tasks efficiently.
Yet, hard skills do not and cannot replace soft skills such as empathy, emotional intelligence, and creativity. The need for interdependency in a workplace among colleagues is greater now than ever. Therefore, hard skills have to go hand in hand with the soft skills in all businesses.
I strongly recommend entrepreneurs to include soft skills development/improvement programs in their life long learning activities at their inception phase in order to sustain their business success.