Wonks and Hacks: soft skills vs hard skills

Hi everyone,

I hope you are doing great. Getting over the quarter is a relieving experience. You know get to pick elective courses and can spend more time on specific career issues.

Every time more often the literature and documented cases show (and this might sound to MBAish) that current successful leaders in any area need to balance their analytical, quantitative, statistical skills (hard skills) with their managerial, interpersonal, organizational skills (soft skills). Note that this is true even for doctoral and post-doctoral students in their academic careers!

However, not many graduates programs have completely account for the importance of achieving this balance. Although all seem to converge to this trend, many schools focus more on the technical tools while others emphasize their students leadership profiles through networking events.

The other fact is that, with a more competitive labor market, the trend had been to more specialization among professionals by area of interest.

Therefore, if your focus is more as a leader, decision making top level official, it has become a priority to understand the technical aspects of the issues that you are discerning about, rather than relying solely on your staff members or outsourcing service providers.

On the other hand, the academic world is also converging to an environment in which the capacity to communicate knowledge has become critical to effective address changes through research. More often you see academic and analytical nerds taking writing and public speaking workshops to develop communicational skills.

In the public policy arena, this is even more evident. Junior legislators come know from more policy-area-specific backgrounds. At the same time, technical staff in consulting firms and public offices is increasingly being trained on management programs.

So if you have been recently admitted to a graduate program or are thinking about applying, take this into account.

In order to be competitive, you nut be able to outperform in both sides of the coin, even if you have comparative advantages on either the technical or the managerial side.

I will try to post material on this!