If you are looking to land a job in a high-paying field poised for strong job growth over the next decade, you may want to make sure you have these non-technical skills.
No matter the job you are applying for, it is important to have non-technical skills for success in your career. According to Indeed, soft skills are important for collaboration and problem solving. Per LinkedIn, creativity, persuasion, adaptability are among the top five most important soft skills that employers are looking for in potential candidates.
To find the most valuable soft skills for the top 30 future jobs, we averaged the scores for each how important skills are for these jobs from the Department of Labor's Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database, where each skill is given an importance score from 0 to 5. We excluded the "project management, all others" and "physicians, all other; and ophthalmologists, except pediatric" occupation groups from our list because O*NET doesn't have skills listed for these broader occupations.
For registered nurses, we used the main overarching job title, although O*NET does provide skill data for more specialized types of registered nurses like critical care nurses. Additionally, some of the occupations on our ranking have more than one specific job title on O*NET. Overall, we looked at 33 specific occupations within those 28 top future jobs, excluding the two broader occupations.
Many of the jobs that we found that are high-paying and expected to grow are in management. Business Insider previously reported on the soft skills leaders need to be effective communicators and perform well in their jobs, according to ResourcefulManager, including being good negotiators and communicators. Forbes Coaches Council also found curiosity, active listening, and resilience as important soft skills to have.
Because some of the other top future jobs are in health care or are various specialists in computer support or in human resources, active listening and critical thinking made the top of the list.
The following are the best soft skills to have in these high-paying jobs with bright futures. It is important to note employment projections are based on data from before the pandemic. BLS is unsure how coronavirus will affect projections as of now, so the best future jobs may change as a result of the pandemic.
We also included each skill's definition as listed on O*NET and the average annual salaries for the three jobs with the highest score in each skill. In the case of a tied score, we ranked the jobs with the highest average salaries as of May 2019, the most recent data available.