What Soft Skills Middle Devs Need to Be Hired for Enterprise Project?
Developers are becoming more and more in demand every year: according to experts’ forecasts, developers’ employment (along with QA analysts and testers) will grow by 22% from 2020 to 2030. Such demand complicates the job search for specialists seeking to participate in serious projects. Nowadays, being tech-savvy (hard skills) is not enough to build an IT career. Employers attach great importance to soft skills, which represent the ability to interact with colleagues. In this article, you will learn what qualities a middle developer needs to become part of an IT team.
Key points
The Role of Soft Skills in the Middle-Specialist Career
The IT industry is constantly changing, dictating the new requirements for candidates for developer positions. To get to the middle position, you need to be fluent in programming languages and have experience working with related tools and technologies. However, something remains unchanged, and these are soft skills. What’s the point?
- Hard skills are professional skills that reflect your knowledge of the technology stack, including development tools, programming languages, frameworks, APIs, etc.
- Soft skills are interpersonal skills that represent your ability to work in a team, organize your work, think out of the box, resolve conflicts, and show empathy.
Fulfilling technical tasks isn’t the only responsibility of a middle specialist. As a middle developer, you’ll make proposals on the architecture and process, discuss the sprint plan and help less experienced colleagues within an IT project. In many companies, middle devs have to independently figure out what the customer wants and pick resolutions to the problem. As you can see, the emphasis is on constant communication and negotiation with colleagues and clients.
Depending on how successfully a specialist performs these tasks, their chances of being hired and pursuing their careers increase:
- Employment. When choosing between candidates with the same professional qualifications, the employer is more likely to prefer someone with good personal qualities. It’s more profitable to hire a responsible person who can build relationships in the team competently.
- Career. Soft skills help to move up in the career. If you want to grow to the senior level, you should gain experience in decision-making, negotiating, and convincing people.
Modern employers offer projects for developers who successfully combine knowledge of technical know-how and talent to build interpersonal relationships while solving problems. Let’s figure out what qualities a candidate for the middle developer position should have.
What Soft Skills Will an Employer Say “Yes” To?
Soft skills are closely related to the character and don’t associate with a particular profession. Nevertheless, they help to do a good job, quickly adapt to new conditions and maintain a friendly atmosphere in the team. Here’s a list of the qualities you need to emphasize in the resume and the interview.
5 Skills of Middle Devs That IT Employers value:
- Communication. Communication skills are a must for middle specialists, as they keep in touch with employees, management, and customers. They also regularly participate in retrospectives and other internal events, where they discuss current issues and solutions with the team. It means that a specialist should know how to conduct constructive negotiations, find compromises, express opinions and give valid arguments.
- Teamwork. Building a product is a team effort, and teamwork is essential here. IT projects usually unite developers, business analysts, designers, testers, marketers, etc. It’s necessary to keep in touch with everyone and make decisions together. Regardless of the activity field, companies need employees who can work effectively in a group and find a common language with colleagues.
- Flexibility in problem-solving. Product development is an “alive” process, where the requirements could change at each stage from initial market analysis to deployment and regular updates. Sometimes, developers have to respond quickly to all adjustments and generate new proposals for improving the product. That’s why your skillset should include creative thinking, adaptability, and problem-solving.
- Discipline. Middle developers usually work on several projects at a time. To achieve success in each, you need to know how to manage time and distribute resources. We are talking about self-organization, i.e. when a specialist can effectively complete a task alone. It can also include work in a limited time frame when you need to set priorities correctly and finish a task by a target date. The specialist must properly decompose tasks and meet deadlines.
- Responsibility. This quality intersects with the previous one. However, it’s not about time management, but the specialist’s attitude to their mistakes. An entry level specialist needs constant help from a senior colleague, including mutual verification of results and work on bugs. But the middle must take responsibility for each flaw and its correction, realistically assess the consequences of mistakes, and adequately respond to criticism from colleagues and management. Responsibility for actions and results distinguishes a beginner specialist from an experienced one.
You should outline relevant personal qualities on your resume. However, we’ll kindly point out the things it would be best to avoid:
- passivity,
- the desire to stay in the comfort zone,
- focusing only on your successes,
- devaluing other team members’ efforts.
And, last but not the least, perfectionism: the desire to do everything perfectly the first time often makes it difficult to find compromises and build a flexible environment. Highlighting your strengths on your resume and in interviews can increase your chances of getting hired by your dream company and participating in significant initiatives.
Conclusion
Good developers know their tech stack and can deliver tasks of various difficulty. However, outstanding developers not only build great software, but know how to manage relationships with people inside and outside the team. Developing soft skills should be one of the key values for those specialists, who want to find a job in big companies and challenging projects. Let’s once again summarize the most valuable soft skills for middle developers:
- Communication
- Teamwork
- Flexibility in solving problems
- Discipline
- Responsibility
Make sure you put those skills on your CV and have a story to support them, and you’ll get desirable job interviews with ease. If you’re seeking middle developer positions, see opportunities on the Talentica website.
Faq
What are soft skills?
Soft skills are features of a general nature, that are associated with personal qualities and aren’t limited to a particular profession or direction. They help to solve life problems and build relationships with other people.
What role do personal qualities play in a career?
Employers pay attention to personal qualities when hiring a new employee. Without personal effectiveness, creative thinking, communication, and leadership, it’s difficult to move up the career ladder today.
What personal qualities are important for the Middle developer?
Efficiency in completing tasks depends on such talents as communicating with people, creating optimal working conditions, and adapting to unexpected changes.
Why are personal qualities necessary in an IT project?
Their demand is connected with constant communication between team members and clients at every stage of work.
