The 14 soft skills every IT pro needs

Hiring managers and recruiters bemoan a soft skills gap in IT, and recent data backs up the sentiment. A LinkedIn report conducted with consulting firm Capgemini found that more employers say their organization lacks soft skills (nearly 60 percent) than hard digital skills (51 percent).

Some firms, such as Vodafone and Citi, find soft skills important enough that they’re using surveys and AI in their interview process to assess communication skills, according to this year’s Global Recruiting Trends report from LinkedIn.

We talked with experts and hiring managers to produce a list of the most sought-after soft skills in IT today. If you’re a candidate with any or all of these skills, they’re useful talking points in your next interview. If not, you may find some areas worth brushing up. And if you’re doing the hiring, these are the skills your peers value most on their teams.

For those who argue that all work is essentially sales — of yourself, the company’s mission or a project or product — closing is the most important soft skill of all.

“At a certain level, irrespective of whatever role you might have, you’re in sales,” says Jay Jamison, vice president of strategy and product management at Quick Base. “Selling people on your ideas or vision for the future — or whether you’re carrying a quota and need to close out a month. Communication skills, self-awareness and the capacity to sell and influence are the top three soft skills I’m looking for.”

Dave Smith, senior director of compute/network/storage engineering at ‎DigitalOcean, looks for good communicators, on teams and in those leading them. “Facilitating good communication patterns on a team not only gets the work done, it also ensures your team is high-performing and happy.”

Smith has a tip for assessing a job candidate’s communication skills: Ask them to walk you through the highlights of their career progression.

“This introduces a storytelling aspect to the interview because they are now sharing the ‘story’ of their professional experience,” Smith says. “At various stages, I like to ask deeper and probing questions to know them better and see how well they do when talking about a subject they know intimately.”

James Stanger, chief technology evangelist at CompTIA, prizes the ability to convert tech jargon into language both business people and consumers can understand.

“I have two valued co-workers who have the uncanny way of boiling things down to a perfect, pithy statement,” Stanger says. “Never mind that sometimes they can get a bit snarky — it’s all in good fun, and their approach has a real use. It really helps everyone level set and move on to discuss both technical and business requirements. You can’t move forward with only one — business lingo — or the other — geek speak.”

Distributed teams in IT are on the rise and collaboration takes extra effort when coworkers are spread out and social cues you’d catch in the office can’t be seen on Slack, email or conference calls.

“The majority of developers work in teams, so good communication is crucial to effectively collaborate and execute,” says ‎DigitalOcean’s Smith. “Additionally, many engineers and developers work remotely, so it’s vital that they can understand, communicate and empathize with their team members, even if they only see them in-person once every few months.”

Technical teams are increasingly expected to address design teams, executives, and marketers at all levels of an organization, says Jeremy Auger, chief strategy officer of cloud-based learning company D2L.

“These employees need the skills to be able to pitch their ideas, manage expectations, and collaborate with stakeholders with different views around what should be possible,” Auger says. “Empathy for users is a critical skill, which more often than not separates successful technology from the unsuccessful.