According to Wikipedia, soft skills are a combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, character or personality traits, attitudes, career attributes, social intelligence and emotional intelligence quotients, among others, that enable people to navigate their environment, work well with others, perform well, and achieve their goals with complementing hard skills. The Collins English Dictionary defines the term "soft skills" as "desirable qualities for certain forms of employment that do not depend on acquired knowledge: they include common sense, the ability to deal with people, and a positive flexible attitude.

Hard skills are also called technical skills and are anything that has to be learned in order to complete a specific task or situation. Unlike soft skills, hard skills are quantifiable and can be tested. This may produce an academic qualification, or technical or professional qualification. Hard skills can be taught, since you can watch someone do something and then copy it. Soft skills are less easy to understand because they relate to an individual’s personality.

Soft skills can also be described as people skills which in turn are talking to others effectively and empathising, understanding ourselves and where necessary moderating our responses, and building trust and respect in relationships.

Fortunately, many of these soft skills can be learned, despite what the Collins English Dictionary states, and there are soft skills training companies in the UK who can help. One of the first things to learn is assertiveness. That doesn’t mean being aggressive. What it means is a quality of being confident and self-assured, but WITHOUT being aggressive.

Very many people do lack confidence at the conscious level, even though they may have it at the sub-conscious level. Assertiveness means being able to stand up for your own rights, or indeed the rights of others, but without being aggressive, or without passively accepting the situation as it is. This is a skill – a soft skill – that you can actually learn, even if you don’t understand how that is possible. When you have the right trainer, it is indeed possible. Furthermore, you can learn how to improve your self-confidence and assertiveness in a training course lasting just a couple of days.

Another one of the courses run by soft skills training companies in the UK is enhancing your relationships with other people and helps you to take a different view of the situations in which you may find yourself every day. This helps to assess your own style and ways of handling things so that you can then begin to develop new approaches in order to produce better long-term relationships with others. Such a course may make you realise that the way you think you appear to other people is not the way that you actually appear to them, and that you need to make changes in order to improve relations for the better.

Yet another course deals with emotional intelligence and begins with learning how to understand your own emotions and, when you have done so, how to control them so that you can change the way in which others see you (which is often incorrect). Effectively, this lets you change what you do from the inside in order to alter perceptions.

Then you can learn how to change things from the outside by seeing the other person’s point of view, while still not letting go of your own. Then you learn how to use your social skills in order to get what is the best result for you and for all those involved.

You can also find a course on how, as a leader (if indeed you are one), you can analyse the effect that you have as a role model and how this can affect the overall productivity of the team. It is a fact that emotions are at the heart of the work experience of everyone in the team and that negative emotions can affect productivity for the worse. Learning how to control negative emotions will improve productivity and the overall success of the team.

You can also find courses that will teach negotiating skills – essential when entering into any sort of negotiations (just ask BA with their proposed pilots strike in August). Other courses are also available on influencing skills and networking skills as well.