The specialist explained that hard skills, or tough skills, include professional and technical competencies.
“Each profession requires a specific set of these skills.
Soft skills, or flexible skills, are over-professional skills that help to solve life problems and work with other people, ”Khlevnaya said.
Such skills, as the expert emphasized, are not associated with a specific specialty or profession, they help a person "to be more adaptive and flexible in solving their professional and life tasks."
“Professional knowledge and skills are undoubtedly important, but the problem of people who are very good at hard skills and do not have soft skills is that they cannot convey their knowledge to society.
If a person wants to live, develop, improve, he must develop both hard skills and soft skills, ”she said.
According to her, now such qualities as “quick adaptation, the ability to constantly learn, master new things, communicate, quickly obtain information, process it, make decisions” are in the first place.
At the same time, as Khlevnaya emphasized, emotional intelligence is the foundation of all soft skills.
“If emotional intelligence is well developed, then a person identifies emotions better, recognizes emotional messages, and understands which emotions are useful in certain situations.
People with high emotional intelligence are better able to regulate the emotional state of both themselves and others.
The greatest competitive advantage belongs to those companies that were able to recruit employees with both good hard skills and a high level of emotional intelligence, ”the expert added.
She stated that a top manager with a developed EI "knows how to use the energy of their emotions and their team to solve business problems."
“The leader of the future is a person with a high level of development of emotional intelligence.
He possesses such qualities as creativity, critical thinking, adaptability, resistance to stress, ”Khlevnaya expressed confidence.
In addition, the expert said that when a company pre-selects employees for the sales department, relying on EI testing, then such a selection of candidates saves significant funds for the company.
“The company especially saves money if it selects top managers taking into account the emotional intelligence of a person.
The selection and adaptation of a leader is extremely costly for a firm.
The cost of this procedure is measured not only in money, but also in the time spent.
When selecting a manager taking into account EI, the company saves from two to 10-20 the salaries of this manager, ”she concluded.
Earlier, Pavel Veshaev, a finance expert at the Moscow branch of the All-Russian public organization of small and medium-sized businesses "Opora Rossii", CEO of FinHelp, told RT how remote work affected the workflow in companies.