Soft Skills or Hard Skills- The Practioners Block
Adihiraj Roy*
Department of Oral Medicine and Radiology, Bapuji Dental College and Hospital, India
Submission: October 30, 2017; Published: December 08, 2017
*Corresponding author: Adihiraj Roy, Department of Oral Medicine and Radiology, Bapuji Dental College and Hospital, Davangere, Karnataka, India, Email: dradhirajoy@gmail.com
Opinion
Today health care professions tussle between the paradigms of thoughts which revolve around what kind of skill set they should show during their first interaction with a patient. There are two types of skill set which a dentist or I would say any health care professional need to be proficient in, i.e. soft and hard skills. To understand, hard skills deal with technical proficiency, soft skills relate to personal values and interpersonal skills that determine a person's ability to fit in a particular situation. Now a day's health care is facing rampant unemployment and stiff competition for the jobs that are available. There are still those who manage to get hired or promoted and 78%-83% of them are not because of their degree or technical expertise, but because of their communication and interpersonal skills.
I have been on both the sides of the interview table and what I have observed and observe during an interview of a candidate is how well can they communicate, how well do they manage their time, how confident are they in certain difficult scenarios and etc. When you are hired by a health care industry, everybody looks into whether you are having both the skill set right and also how well you express them at the right time. Unfortunately, it's a rarity to find these skills amongst freshers or even experienced dentists. This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licens DOI: 10.19080/ADQH.2017.06.555700 As these are never taught at any dental school and it's a challenge to teach and develop such skills. With the right soft skills, we can deliver a positive and powerful energy to our patients. That in turn helps us in gaining the trust and making delivery of the dental care easy. Imagine a patient on your dental chair who doesn't trust you, no matter how well you are with your technical skills, the outcome will never be appreciated as the treatment outcome is always patient centric.
If we look into the depths of reality practice, soft skills help us to organize, plan and manage, and track changes during the course of the growing dental practices. It is really helpful to all practitioners to grow their practices using soft skills. To introduce this change into our dental health care system we at Vatsalya Incubation and Innovation centre, look into develop such skills amongst the doctors who join us to deliver compassionate and holistic care to all who visits our practices. So, take a look around at the most successful people you know and study the soft skills they have on display. There's a good chance those personality traits have helped them get where they are today and that the same skills could help you advance in your field as well. So which skill set would you choose now?