Why you need Soft skills to succeed In your Tech Career

by Kamal Kaaba, CEO, Hillside Technology (bet365’s technology business)

Neo in The Matrix. Flynn in Tron. Elliot Alderson in Mr. Robot. Hollywood has a habit of casting coders as loners who spend their days hammering away at keyboards in darkened rooms.

While there’s a certain romanticism to this image, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Especially in the vibrant modern environments of today’s large-scale technology businesses. Certainly, over the course of your career, you’ll undoubtedly spend a large chunk of your time at a keyboard, but you’ll rarely be working on your own.

At bet365, we currently employ over 1000 technologists working across multiple teams, which utilise different technologies, based in Stoke and Manchester. Each team has its own set of responsibilities that feed into the delivery of their department’s objectives and ultimately come together to ensure the business achieves its commercial goals.

As the company has grown, the scope and scale of the architecture that underpins it has increased in both size and complexity. There’s a diverse mix of technologies, development languages, and hardware at play that ensure we deliver a first-class service. Our platform has to handle high levels of concurrency at peak time and process millions of transactions during live sporting events.

To ensure we can achieve this objective at pace and meet the immovable deadlines of the sporting calendar, collaboration is key.

Every day people are coming together to build consensus on the right approach to take. That might include day-to-day code creation, deciding which technologies are most appropriate for the development of a new application or the adoption of a new paradigm as we’ve done recently with Kubernetes.

In this environment of collaboration, consensus building and leadership, soft skills are critical and, in many ways, compliment the technical skills that you’ll continue to build upon.

What are soft skills?

Soft skills are a combination of people, social and communication skills, that enable you to navigate your environment, work well with others, perform well and achieve your goals.

Unlike technical skills, which are learned, they relate to your disposition, character and attitude. They include attributes like leadership, teamwork, problem-solving, flexibility and adaptability. When applied, they enhance your ability to get a job done.

Why are soft skills important?

Individual success is not just about the individual. When working as part of a team, you’ve got to be able to work well with other people to achieve your personal goals.

That may mean convincing others to your way of thinking, being sympathetic to the challenges team members are experiencing so you can offer help or having the flexibility to adapt to a technical ecosystem that’s in a constant state of flux.

As you progress through your career, there are those of you who’ll decide that you want to take on a management role, become a team leader or run your own department. While your technical skills will always be important, your soft skills will become more so.

Soft skills are essential in deciphering how best to coordinate, manage and lead others. They enable you to build a positive working environment that gets the most out of the people you work with because they feel you understand them and have their best interests at heart.

How do you acquire soft skills?

In a recent survey undertaken by the National Association of Colleges and Employees, employers were asked to name the attributes they sought out most in new recruits. The top three were leadership, the ability to work as a team and communication skills.

It is no wonder then that more and more employers are developing soft skill programmes as part of the initial and ongoing development of their employees.

Our in-house learning and development programme will support your growth and development, it is available to all of our graduates covers the full range of soft skills from self-management, effective communication and team working all the way to developing greater emotional intelligence. For us, there are several mutual benefits to the programme.

The commercial environment is very different from the campus and can be a bit of a shock for some. The PEP is excellent for helping our graduates to get ready for the workplace. Not only do you acquire the necessary skills, but you also get a view of the organisation, your place in it and the meaningful impact you’re going to make.

Soft skills have always been important in business. Today, they are better understood than ever before and savvy employers are helping their employees to develop the soft skills to ensure they get the very best out of each other.

Interested in working at bet365?

If you’d like to join the team, then create a profile on the hackajob platform, where they’re currently hiring for a variety of roles across the world or log in to your profile here.

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