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Soft skills are usually harder because you can’t manufacture social situations at will to practice. Also, it’s not as safe to fail because of that, so the pressure is higher.

Whereas a project to learn a technical skill, we can come up with them and dial up/down the difficulty to accommodate for our comfort level.

So interesting how a mix of both is so important, but sometimes hard to come by!

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I would say it is EXTREMELY hard to come by as a balanced mix!

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Why do you think that is?

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Culturally, people are consistently advised to build hard skills. This is a good suggestion, but only if you complement them with all those other aspects which I refer to as "appreciating skills".

A lot of professionals even see basic stuff like "self-promotion" or "great communication" or "sales" as "fluff".

They don't understand their value, therefore they don't invest the time to master them.

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Very true. I remember reading a bunch of project management books a few years back and only one emphasized soft skills. Which is quite interesting because project management is really 80% soft skills.

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I wonder if “practice” can come from frequently changing your environment. For example, compare someone with a 20 year career at 3 companies versus someone with 12 years of experience at 6 companies. The latter would likely encounter more variance and have more practice even though they have had fewer years working. This is assuming practice makes a person better

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You make a valid consideration! I'm undecided.

If you change a lot, I agree you have exposure to many more view points. That's value in that.

At the same time, you are essentially incapable to "endure". Resilience is an important component of business success in my view.

So... Maybe find some balance?

Also, if you want to get to an executive position, normally you have to "grow" into those within a company. After a certain level, it is typically hard to get hired into it. It depends on your goals really.

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A good path might be a lot of variance at the beginning to understand the rules of the game and then double down if that's the desire!

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I'd say agencies or agency-like businesses can be a great way to bring variance because there is usually a lot of volume of people and projects.

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Absolutely. That’s why so many job ads say “agency experience preferred” or sometimes even required.

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I'm glad we reached the conclusion that consulting is the best job in the world.

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