Dear women, technical skills will get you a job, soft skills will have you fired
Members of staff during a meeting. Soft skills are important to help women secure and retain jobs.
What you need to know:
- From the 2022 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey, 40.3 per cent of women had not been employed in the 12 months before the survey was done, compared to 18.5 per cent for men.
- Between September 2022 and November 2023, researchers from the University of Nairobi studied how soft skills differently affected male and female trainees entering the job market.
Before Naomi Murumba joined Nairobi Technical Training Institute in 2020 for a certificate course in food and beverage production, she had little idea how she would secure an industrial attachment, a prerequisite for graduation.
“I knew to get an attachment, I needed to know someone who knew someone who would help. But I didn’t,” she says.
One thing saved her, though. One of the course units focused on communication, negotiation, persuasion and emotional intelligence.
She mastered the knowledge and when the time came to search for placement, she pulled out the cards.
“No one helped me at all to secure my attachment. I just approached the human resource managers in the hotels I visited with confidence and organised thoughts,” she says.
Stress management
“We were also trained in stress management, which helped me cope with the disappointment of failing to get a place soon enough.”
A month after a buoyant search, she got the attachment at a hotel in the Ngara area of Nairobi.
“I believe the way I presented myself earned me the attachment. I know many were looking for the opportunity but they opted to settle on me. That means I impressed the human resource manager,” she says.
“You know my work requires someone who can communicate clearly and is patient with customers. I demonstrated that and the hotel manager promised to call me as soon as they had an employment offer.”
In a country where the unemployment rate among women is twice that of men, such soft skills are important to help them not only secure industrial attachment, internship or apprenticeship opportunities but also paid work.
From the 2022 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, 40.3 per cent of women had not been employed in the 12 months before the survey was done, compared to 18.5 per cent for men.
Between September 2022 and November 2023, researchers from the University of Nairobi studied how soft skills differently affected male and female trainees entering the job market.
They concluded that women benefitted more than men as the confidence energised them to relentlessly seek economic opportunities in Kenya and abroad.
The study drew 3,827 students from four technical and vocational education and training centres in Nairobi and Kiambu counties who were exposed to soft skills such as self-awareness, gender competency, finding work and emotional awareness and interpersonal influence.
Of those interviewed, 55 per cent were male students and 45 per cent were women.
In the current competitive job market, these people skills are the break or make it gateway to sustainable employment, the researchers, Dr Laura Barasa and Dr Phyllis Machio, emphasised.
Finding
“Good qualifications by themselves cannot get you a job. You need soft skills,” noted Dr Machio when sharing their preliminary findings on March 26, 2024, in Nairobi.
“An employer will drop a first-class honours without the soft skills for a second-class honours with the soft skills,” she pointed out.
Although the study found a mismatch in the trainees’ expectations of getting a job within three to six months, more women than men were found to be hopeful.
Also read: Women, here’s why you fail job interviews
In September 2022, 47 per cent of women students were hopeful of securing a job during the period, unlike 45 per cent of men. This expectation dropped to 37 per cent for men in November 2023, when the 39 per cent of women kept the faith.
Getting a job is, however, one thing and keeping it is another.
Grace Kaome, a human resource manager at the Federation of Kenya Employers, warned that “technical skills will get you the job, but soft skills will have you fired.”
