How To Get a Promotion in Tech: Balance Technical and Soft Skills
Exploring the balance between deep technical skills and the soft skills needed for higher-level positions.
When planning how to get a promotion at work, it’s important to know that it takes different types of skills to achieve your career goals. Even in technical companies, it takes more than just technical skills to get a promotion. While individuals who are only versed at soft skills may struggle, the ones who have a good combination of both are bound to prosper. It takes a bit of practice and a healthy amount of experience to understand which skills you need to grow. Additionally, each employer prioritizes skills differently, regardless of the best combination for the business bottom line.
What do I mean by technical skills?
Technical skills are usually defined based on an individual’s ability to address a set of technical problems in a complex environment. These could be isolated problems connected to a specific technical stack, or they could be a combination of problems across the whole architecture. Getting good at solving these challenges typically requires a lot of exposure through either experience or education. exists to solve a technical problem and must provide solutions to the market for those problems, People who become good at solving problems usually keep a template library of solutions and approaches. No new problem is exactly the same, but requires a combination of solutions that worked previously, a bit of imagination, experimentation, and some luck. Also, to simplify generically, the problems are usually between the human and the technology or between the human and the problems statement.
What do I mean by soft skills?
Soft skills, on the other hand, are the skills needed to effectively manage flow between humans. While they are practiced in the context of technology, nevertheless they focus on the abilities of individuals to clearly communicate their goals, needs, details, and vision. These abilities also include ways to evoke emotions and commitment in others and generate inspiration for a specific vision. More highly skilled professionals also become very effective at conflict resolution over time and hyper-tune their emotional feedback.
What are some of the major differences?
You might have noticed that there are some similarities and differences between those skills. The main difference is that technical skills focus on solutions between humans and technology and the soft skills focus on solutions between humans. That’s pretty much the main difference. There are many similarities in ways that these skills are obtained - experience, education, and experimentation. All of these approaches require time and commitment.
Why are technical skills important?
Technology companies would not exist without their technical experts. A technology company by default otherwise it cannot be a technical company. The company spends years recruiting, training and managing its technical talent in order to solve the market problems better. It takes years, rigor and patience to accumulate experience to solve technical skills. Replacement of an experienced employee takes a long time and without them the company may go out of the business altogether.
Why are soft skills important?
The same is interestingly true about the soft skills. Without enough people who excel in their soft skills, the company is bound to fall apart. Without experts who are able to take a technical solution and bring it to the clients in the ways that enables clients satisfaction and long-term commitment, the company will be severely impacted at the bottom line. Soft skills are responsible for creating cohesion between various views, organizing and scaling teams. Soft skills also settle disagreements and inspire everyone with amazing vision statements.
How to Get a Promotion: Integration of the Skills
As you have probably guessed, the best way to ensure company success is to have a healthy balance between technical and soft skills. If you, individually, lack one or the other, then it is time to prioritize building up the proper skillset. While you can still advance if you only are very strong in soft skills or technology, at some point the growth will level off and your impact will be reduced. Others who have been able to master this balance will get ahead of you on the corporate ladder.
What about the employer's perspective?
While it is important for individuals to prioritize optimizing the balance between soft and technical skills, it is equally important that it is done in the context of company priorities. First of all, the leaders of the company need to be aware of the importance of balancing these skills. If the leaders are promoting one type of skill or the other, they are more likely not to reward those who are trying to find a proper balance. It is important to be aware of the leaders’ communication as that will provide clarity on which direction will serve your career best.
Secondly, the decision-making process that an employer goes through to award promotions is often a set of decision gates that evaluate how the candidate will succeed in the new role. Sometimes it is a risk that employers have to take and mitigate. And sometimes it is not a risk, because a to-be-promoted individual already operates at the level needed for promotion. Basically the easiest way to get promoted is to identify the soft and technical skills that are required for the higher role and make sure that you are well polished on those. In addition, get involved in the projects that expose you to wider company audiences and also give you a chance to demonstrate all of the skills necessary for the promotion.
How soft skills help technologists?
As technologists, we tend to focus on the problem at hand without taking into consideration how our technical approach needs to be wrapped in order to make it most workable for the client. We tend to prioritize technical expertise over any soft skills. However, a technologist without soft skills is akin to a technical solution that only works on your desktop or your bench. It takes much more time, effort and integration for it to start working properly in production. Many connections need to be adopted to the needs of the other systems, in the same way as the solutions need to be adopted to the needs of other humans through practice of soft skills.
Seek continuous alignment and learning
Learning any skill is hard and requires time commitment and dedication. Many cannot be learned on the weekend and require continuous practice in order to excel. With time, you will improve your skills and achieve balance. Then, you’ll have a much higher chance of promotion in a proper context.
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If you are looking for better ways to gain one set of skills or the other, let’s chat more and schedule your complimentary session.
