Master These Soft Skills In Your Career, Because ChatGPT Can’t Help

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Master These Soft Skills In Your Career, Because ChatGPT Can’t Help

Despite significant and ever-expanding capabilities, there are certain areas in your career where ChatGPT can’t help you. While artificial intelligence can assist with your résumé, your interview skills, PowerPoint presentations and maybe even your relationships, ChatGPT can’t do it all. Here are four critical and common areas where soft skills matter in your career. Whether you are looking for a new job, or looking to excel in the one you have, these soft skills are the key to hard results.

Delivering a Presentation or Pitch: Communication Skills

While ChatGPT can help you with honing your message, you still have to have the presence to stand and deliver. Emotional nuances and delivery - including body language, tone, eye contact and other non-verbal cues - are things that AI can’t replicate. Perhaps most importantly, your ability to respond to questions in real-time is a vital soft skill. How you respond when your PowerPoint doesn’t work, or when your ideas don’t work for your boss, is where your soft skills show up. Noticing disengagement is also a part of emotional intelligence and situational awareness - a uniquely human characteristic that a presenter must possess and demonstrate. Reading about how to deal with disinterest isn’t the same as knowing how to address it. Turns out, your experience always matters in a presentation or pitch. Because adaptability, resilience and flexibility are vital soft skills that ChatGPT can’t provide.

Building Genuine Human Relationships: Interactive Skills

Networking, mentoring, coaching, and bonding with colleagues: these very human tasks are outside the realm of AI and ChatGPT. But how far outside? Significant progress has been made to advance AI in the realm of recognition - so that AI can interpret tone of voice and micro-gestures. Israeli social scientist and author, Yuval Noah Harari, described the evolution of AI in the area of relationships. He says that “AI is becoming better and better at understanding our feelings and emotions, and therefore becoming better at developing relationships.” It seems that collaboration is a job for both humans, and AI.

Forbes now says that it’s possible to fall in love with AI, as the line between what’s real and artificial is blurred. (What’s crystal clear is that the love is not mutual. With AI, if it looks like caring it’s actually programming.) One company that’s leading the way in artificial intelligence, and artificial relationships, is Replika - where users can create AI “companions who care”. Today the demand for AI girlfriends is on the rise, and advancements in making the artificial seem real will further propel this trend. Meanwhile, driving engagement in professional relationships is sort of like a hug: it’s a soft skill that only humans can demonstrate.

Having a Difficult Conversation: Leadership Skills

Negotiating a salary increase. Navigating office politics. Providing correction or clarification to your boss or a co-worker. Firing someone. These kinds of conversations and negotiations are places where human intuition is required. At the heart of these persuasive conversations are multiple soft skills: your ability to think on your feet, to listen, and to demonstrate both empathy and clarity of purpose are critical. When it comes to communication, AI and ChatGPT can be a real asset - especially when providing ideas for what to say. But when it comes to actually participating in the conversation, experiencing the challenges, and reacting in real time, that practice is still fully human.

Ethical and Moral Decision Making: Determination and Decisiveness

One of the advantages of AI is its neutrality: the ability to see circumstances and situations without emotion. However, when it comes to the soft skills that can propel your career forward, subjective values are yours and yours alone to consider. While AI can help with exploring the impact of various decisions, especially those regarding the allocation of (human) resources, the choice ultimately rests with the individual. Business is filled with gray areas, where balancing profit objectives and personal considerations can exceed the reach of ChatGPT. Making decisions around your personal well-being and the well-being of your colleagues is a crucial soft skill. The soft skill of decision-making is something that must be cultivated, so that you can make the right choice in your career.

When it comes to using ChatGPT, and other forms of AI like Midjourney, Google’s Gemini and others, it’s best to remember that the map is not the territory. Today, AI is a tool and a resource - like a map, or a GPS. The tool relies on human interpretation in order to determine its value. The GPS or the map is useful because of how you apply its guidance. So too with AI. Tools are combined with soft skills, demonstrated via human contact, so that you can respond in the moment to critical-path career decisions.