The Most Overlooked Salesforce Skills - Take Your Career to the Next Level

There's no denying hard skills are important on the technical side of Salesforce; whether you're a Developer, Technical Architect, in a hybrid role, or aspiring to become one of the aforementioned. What is often overlooked, and arguably one of the most important skills to have, is soft skills.

In a recent Developers Group Meet Up we attended, James Hou spoke on the importance of soft skills, how to develop them, and how to put them into action. The key takeaways from James' presentation are the following:

  • Active Translation: Being able to turn techno-babble into layman's terms while still making your point or collecting information. Business stakeholders will like working with you, which is pretty important.

  • Listen: Listen, acknowledge, and even if you disagree, you’re looking for what they need (even if they don’t know yet).

  • Document: Visual representation (spreadsheets, sticky notes, JIRA etc.) of your workload helps stakeholders understand bandwidth, and thus priority. If you don’t have a backlog, start it now.

  • Keep Conversations Focused: When topics begin to go off topic, gentle reminders about what the current goal / action item at hand goes a long way to help sync everyone partaking

  • See the XY Problem: We all get caught up in solutioning. Sometimes we have to ask ourselves: “What is the original problem we’re trying to solve”?

Soft skills are not something you develop overnight; it's something you have to practice and continuously work on to be comfortable with and be successful at. Soft skills aren't "soft" - work at it and start now!

Above all, remember that it's okay to fail. Keep moving forward. Own your mistakes and you will earn trust and transparency from stakeholders.

Want to see some of James' most recent developments? Check them out here: https://github.com/tsalb

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