English in the Present Day Scenario

The term soft skills had a wider meaning in the sense. It is very difficult to define soft skills. But in my opinion soft skills are skills which give additional knowledge apart from subject knowledge. Soft skills include communication, listening, negotiation, etiquette and language skills etc.

Soft skills play a vital role for professional success; they help one to excel in the work place and their importance cannot be denied in this age of information and knowledge. Those were the days jobs were given on Degrees and Testimonials. In olden days the employer was given importance to only for getting things done but now the employer is giving importance for how fast and how well things done .Good soft skills which are in fact scarce in the highly competitive corporate world will help you to stand out in a milieu of routine job seekers with mediocre skills and talent.

Subjects like financial management, marketing management and HR management can be taught in the class room and can be studied at home. But not soft skills. Soft skills are acquired and experienced on the spot and cannot be developed by merely reading text books. It is a continuous learning process. Here are some soft skills which come under Attitude and Behavioural Skills can be practiced in everybody’s life and helps one to excel in any profession.

1. Greet:

Greeting or wishing others is a very good thing in everybody’s life. We see many people or even our colleagues or classmates passing by us as if they were unnoticed, though they looked us. It is an evil thing to practice. It creates negative impression on others. In fact, there is nothing to loose just by wishing or greeting, but we can gain a lot by doing so. It creates good impression on us and we can also win the favour of others. And some more times we may get things done so easily for just greeting. So it is a good custom to cultivate in our day to day life.

Here are some guidelines to win others

a) Greet your family members first in the morning. If you are not used to this, they will be surprised with your sudden and nice gestures.

b) Greet your peers, subordinates and Boss once you enter the office or college. Smile at even the “security personnel” standing at the gate, who takes care of your safety.

c) Greet your friends along the way and do not ignore them.

2. Have an eye contact while you speak:

Recent studies suggest that eye contact has a positive impact on the retention and recall of information and may promote efficient learning. We observe in our day to day life many people speaking to others by bowing their head down to earth or looking upon walls or here and there. It won’t serve the purpose of communication.

William Shakespeare said that Face is the index of the mind. We can understand speaker’s intention and what is in his mind just looking at his face. Face consists of many organs like ears, nose, mouth and eyes etc. But only eyes reflect the reality. Some times even our elders say if they got suspicious of any thing “speak tome by looking into my eyes”. It is their intention even one tells lie, his eyes never tell lie. Eyes reflect the reality. So if we want to understand the real intention of the speaker, we should have eye contact with him.

Even in the teaching the teacher should have eye contact with the students to know whether students are following his lessons or not. The students also should have eye contact with the teacher to receive things in a right way.

3. Positive Attitude: The term positive attitude has a wider meaning in the sense. It is very difficult to define. But it is one of the easiest steps for the success. In my opinion

A person with positive attitude can make any thing out of nothing But a person with negative attitude can make nothing out of something. There is a saying in English An optimist sees the rose But a pessimist sees the thorn. We know that rose is a beautiful flower which attracts everybody with its beauty and grandeur. If we go to pluck it with our hands, it hurts us and sometimes we may shed our blood also due to dangerous thorns surrounded by it. Success is also like a beautiful rose which won’t come to us so easily with out pain and hard work. A person with positive attitude can only see the rose alone, he never minds thorns. But a person with negative attitude can see thorns, and worries much about it, ignoring the honour and name he gets after it. In one sense here I concluder saying that if we have positive attitude we can achieve any thing in our life and can surmount any hard obstacle.