7 Soft Skills That will Improve Your Online Job Prospects

More than your technical knowledge you need soft skills to be successful in any business and especially in online jobs. For example, you may be a talented graphic designer whose work is super creative, but if you constantly miss deadlines or don’t listen to the feedback from clients’ it will lead to costly project delays or upset clients. you will not win more prospects in the future.  

According to LinkedIn’s 2019 Global Talent Trends report, 89 percent of recruiters say when a hire doesn’t work out, it usually comes down to a lack of soft skills.

What are the soft skills you need to succeed while working from home? Below are a few soft skills recommended for online jobs.

Time Management

This is one of the most important soft skills you can have for your online job success. While working from home whether you are employed or working for yourself. Working from home is more flexible in terms of time. You don’t have a clock-in system to guide you on the time you should spend working. 

If you don’t manage your time, you will find yourself struggling to meet deadlines and/or submitting low-quality work.  A good online freelancer is judged by their ability to submit the best job within the timeline required. 

There are many ways to manage your time with a simple google calendar or other complex apps that assist you in managing your time. This will ensure you are more organized and productivity is high

Communication

The basis of good relationships between people is good communication. For online jobs, communication is essential because you don’t have the luxury to communicate face to face therefore some facial expressions, body language, gestures, and interactions are missed. There is also a high likelihood of miscommunications online depending on the tone that your readers read your content. 

Good communications create a positive image. Providing your client with the services they need is easier when you and your client clearly understand what is expected of you. Good communication will build good relations and partnerships in the future. 

To be able to communicate effectively, you need to know who your client is, what they want, when, where, why, and how they want it done. Once you have this figured out you are likely to have strong communication with your online client. 

Personal Branding

Strategically building your online presence should be part of your personal brand. Keeping a blog or social media account active and posting content that reflects your values and interests will help create a strong online personal brand. 

If, for instance, you are passionate about environmental issues and are interested in attracting work from companies with an environmental focus, you should share posts that are relevant to environmental issues on your personal and business social media pages and blogs.

Choosing a niche that matches your interests will give you a better chance of being hired for jobs that are related to your interests.

Join a Community

It can be lonely doing online jobs because you don’t have colleagues to build teams with, exchange ideas and solutions, or get a different perspective on an issue.  

On the other hand, there are freelancer communities like Facebook groups and other online communities where you can meet other freelancers and connect with people who do similar work.  

Adaptability.

Being flexible and agile with every job you get is an advantage that many freelancers have to strive to get. Whenever you build a partnership, you must be able to learn new ways of working with new clients and satisfy their needs.  

If your client’s brand is casual then even the tone of your content created for them should be casual. 

Even if you are a niche online freelancer, the approach and specialization may be different with each client. Maybe your niche is in graphic design, you may get a client who wants their content only in animations and illustrations. You will need to learn how to create for their specific area. 

Problem-solving

This is a soft skill that is required for life not only for online jobs. Any client who seeks your help is looking for a solution to a problem. With good communication, you can figure out what problem the client is trying to solve and align your job to solving it. All clients want results from you. 

For example, if get a data entry online job. The client wants you to enter data for a purpose. It could be for the analysis of their customer behavior, to process claims for an insurance company, or to analyze the viability of a product. Therefore, as you do the job you should always have the client end goal in mind so that you can give them quality and ensure you have future quality jobs in the future and referrals to other clients in their industry. 

 Critical thinking

Critical thinking is a soft skill that makes your clients keep coming. That is means the client comes to you because you will have innovative solutions that will make them stand out.  

Having the ability to weigh the positives and negatives of every idea and come up with a solution that works for both you and the client makes them feel like you are partners.  

You have to learn and know what is important to your jobs and with new ideas, you will be able to get better productivity of your jobs. 

If you are a content creator for a website and your client wants to increase the number of subscribers to their site, you may create a quiz that will encourage your readers to submit their email address so that they can get the quiz. This also generates an email list to be used for the promotion of the client’s products to new customers.  

Conclusion

We have to learn through our jobs and if we can develop the above soft skills we are on our way to improving and scaling up our jobs online.

As online freelancers, we are our own bosses, and it is up to us to give the best so that we can be successful and earn big money with home jobs online. 

Do you use any of these productivity hacks in your daily workflow? Feel free to tell us about your success in the comments!