Soft skills | Pharmacy pathways

Soft Skills

As a residency or employment candidate you need to exhibit a variety of soft skills in addition to other relevant skills. During your Residency Interview you may be ranked on these categories:

What are soft skills?

This phrase is often used to describe the skills which characterise relationships with other people, or which are about how you approach life and work. Other phrases that are often used for these types of skills include: people skills, interpersonal skills, social skills, and transferable skills.

Attitude:

What is your attitude towards pharmacy and what do you hope to contribute to the field. Your excitement, interest, passion and energy will reflect in your attitude during your interview.

Flexibility:

Are you showing willingness to learn, to accept other opinions, and to try new things? How do you receive constructive criticism? are you usually defensive or accepting about it? What are the steps you take after receiving feedback?

Communication Skills:

People with strong communication skills can build relationships, listen well, and vary their communication to suit the circumstances. Effective verbal communication begins with clarity. This often requires nothing more than slowing down and speaking more thoughtfully. Many people feel rushed to respond to questions and conversations immediately, but it is better to pause for a moment in consideration, especially if the question merits it. No one expects, or wants, a gun-slinging attitude in important conversations. A thoughtful person is generally taken more seriously. Rounding off this skill is the ability to stay calm, focused, polite, interested and to match the mood or emotion of the situation.

Making Decisions:

This is a characteristic valued by employers for many reasons. Being able to make decisions is key to getting on in life. Decision making requires intuition and reasoning. One way to apply both reason and intuition is to apply the two aspects in turn. It's useful to start with reason, and gather facts and figures. Once you have an obvious 'decision', its the turn of intuition. How do you feel about the answer? Does it feel right?

Leadership Skills

Not every employer is going to lead a project in the future. However with the pace of change and staff growth, many are turning to employees for assistance in training and mentoring new team members.

Team-working skills

Employees will likely be members of a varity of teas through their course of employment. Team skills have become a necessary part of our corporate culture.

Problem solving ability:

What makes this a skill is not necessarily how quickly you can solve a problem, but how you go about doing it. No plan is a guarantee, so there is always an element of risk. Some people can weigh risk better than others.

The key aspects of successful problem solving are being able to identify exactly what the problem is, dissecting the problem so that it is fully understood, examining all options pertaining to solutions, setting up a system of strategies and objectives to solve the problem, and finally putting this plan into effect and monitoring its progress.

Critical thinking

Is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.

Stress:

Give specific examples of coping strategies you have used during stressful times.