Every technology professional needs two distinct, overlapping, and complementary skill sets in order to enjoy a successful career—no matter how you define success.
The first set of skills is your hard skills, the technology skills that let you get the job done every day. Those are your programming skills, your systems admin skills, your network engineering skills, your security skills, and so on. They’re the ones you likely focused on in school, and they’re probably the ones you think about most when it comes to looking and applying for jobs.
The second set of skills is what I call the squishy ones, or what the industry more commonly calls soft skills. These are the skills that require no technical prowess but that instead more often focus on human prowess. These are skills like communication, teamwork, conflict resolution, leadership, and the like.
In my 20-odd years in the tech world, I’ve found that the difference between the best technologists and the just-okay ones is the soft skills. The best technologists are amazing technical experts, of course, but they also engage with their peers, colleagues, customers, and coworkers more effectively. They bring a human side to technology, and it’s a big part of what drives their success.