Transferable or Soft Skills are Essential for Entrepreneurial Success

Transferable or Soft Skills are Essential for Entrepreneurial Success

Soft skills are defined as the capabilities that facilitate personal interactions with other people. Transferrable skills can be developed over time through different experiences. The skills include communication, time management, conflict resolution, team building, delegation, and stress management. Additional soft and transferrable skills involve taking calculated risks, adaptability, resilience, creativity, and innovation. These skills are more related to an individual’s attitude and tendencies than technical capabilities. Studies have established that entrepreneurial success depends on technical or challenging skills and soft and transferrable skills (Youth Business International, 2019). Soft and transferrable skills are essential for the achievement of entrepreneurial success because they facilitate the individuals’ ability to deal with the dynamics within the business environment as they pertain to human resource management, teamwork, pitching ideas, selling/marketing, managing time, work-life balance, and diversification/expansion.

Entrepreneurs’ Transferrable/Soft Skills

Entrepreneurs are defined as individuals who identify and take advantage of gaps in the market. Utilizing technical or organizational innovation is valuable in exploiting the markets’ gaps. Entrepreneurs tend to demonstrate initiative, appetite for risk, creativity, and opportunism. Such individuals can rely on their creativity and intuition to identify the opportunities in their market. Upon recognition, the entrepreneur is responsible for organizing resources, investing, and ensuring they attain a return. The ability to create a market demand or awareness of the demand’s existence in the targeted market is critical for partially successful entrepreneurship (Thom, 2016).

According to various researchers, entrepreneurs still tend to fail even after successfully undertaking the initial step. The failure is attributed to a lack of skills, incompetence, and shortcomings in the existing skills. Both technical and soft skills are essential for success in entrepreneurship. The identified soft skills included planning, strategic thinking, recognition of opportunities, and leadership. The primary skills that were found to be conclusive include networking, knowledge of the market, as well as management of a business. These observations are common among entrepreneurs in diverse sectors (Thom, 2016).

Therefore, entrepreneurs who succeed are different from those who fail. Successful entrepreneurs possess various skills, including creativity, identifying opportunities, leveraging resources, marketing, leadership, strategic thinking, organization, controlling, negotiation, communication, problem-solving, and networking (Thom, 2016). Researchers agree that balancing these soft skills and other essential knowledge and capabilities is necessary for successful entrepreneurship (Mulder, 2017).

Youth Business International (2019) states successful entrepreneurs need soft skills. The findings that strengthen this conclusion establish the need to improve these skills and develop new ones. The study explores specific skill groups. These include intra/interpersonal skills, creativity, problem-solving, risk management, opportunities, information management, and growth mindset skills. Among the skill groups, specific soft skills manifest, including communication, planning, organization, time management, creativity, innovation, creating and managing reputations, seeking information, and coping with ambiguous situations. In addition, persistence, tenacity, resilience, optimism, motivation, flexibility, and adaptability are highlighted as critical skills (Tem, Kuroda, & Tang, 2020).

According to Tem, Kuroda, and Tang (2020), soft skills enable entrepreneurs to remain competitive and productive. This conclusion was made after interviewing five entrepreneurs who were categorized as successful. The leading soft skills that were identified include problem-solving and critical thinking. Besides competing in the market, entrepreneurs can create employment opportunities, improve local and national economies, and reduce poverty. These skills and the rest identified in the document are critical in creating an enabling environment for employees and a comfortable environment for clients. Entrepreneurs must lead their employees to undertake beneficial tasks enabling service and product delivery. At the same time, clients can tackle various stressors in the environment while interacting with entrepreneurs or their employees. Communicating and finding solutions to problems practically applies to all stakeholders that entrepreneurs encounter (Universitat Politècnica de València, 2017).

Suppose an entrepreneur lacks these skills; significant elements of the business could go wrong. First, the clients may not be satisfied with the service delivery process because employees cannot understand their needs, find solutions, and package these attractively. Secondly, entrepreneurs fail to identify opportunities, manage the risks associated with various business activities, and allocate resources appropriately. These two instances depict the importance of soft skills and their revolution around the entire business premise, thus affecting the outcome.

Conclusion

Soft and transferrable skills are essential for the achievement of entrepreneurial success because they facilitate the individuals’ ability to deal with the dynamics within the business environment as they pertain to human resource management, teamwork, pitching ideas, selling/marketing, managing time, work-life balance, and diversification/expansion. These abilities are demonstrated through the studies from different scholars. From a practical perspective, an entrepreneur can’t operate successfully without soft skills. Therefore, every entrepreneur should strive to improve and develop additional soft skills.

References

Mulder, M. (2017). Competence and the Need for Transferable Skills. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-41713-4

Tem, S., Kuroda, A., & Tang, K. N. (2020). The Importance of Soft Skills Development to Enhance Entrepreneurial Capacity. International Educational Research, 3(3), 1. doi:10.30560/her.v3n3p1

Thom, M. (2016). Crucial Skills for the Entrepreneurial Success of Fine Artists. Artivate, 5(1), 3-24.

Universitat Politècnica de València. (2017). Soft Skills for Entrepreneurs.

Youth Business International. (2019). Entrepreneurial soft skills for the future: A scoping study.

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Transferable or Soft Skills are Essential for Entrepreneurial Success

In week 3, you posted a thesis for peer review. Use the revised view, based on your classmates and teacher’s feedback, as the basis for your persuasive paper.
Use your sources to support your thesis. Research and prepare the passages you will consider using. Remember to review methods of paraphrasing, summarizing, and using direct quotations.
Prepare the body paragraphs by deciding where to place supporting information. Remember, each section of the paper should build the argument’s momentum.
Apply pathos, logos, and ethos whenever possible.
Finally, remember that it’s okay if your ideas, opinions, or sources change while writing this paper. Writing makes us think, and it’s beneficial to have our thoughts change as we express them on paper.