If you are ready to head out into the construction industry because you have the proper training for operating heavy equipment and machinery, or you have the proper certifications for a specific job you may need to brush up on your soft skills. Without the proper soft skills training, you will not be able to land that job that you trained for. Soft skills involve content in three critical areas – interpersonal skills, logical skills, and communication skills.

Interpersonal skills involve collaboration and successful teamwork while logic skills involve your decision-making and critical thinking and communication skills pertaining to listing and speaking. You will need all these skills to have a successful job interview, and you will also need these skills to be able to handle daily tasks out in the field and to work well with others. After all, construction is a team effort.

When you go to a training school to learn how to be a professional driver, to become a crane operator or a signalperson or how to operate that heavy equipment, you will most likely have some soft skills training as well. Most schools take their role seriously and will work to ensure that you are prepared to enter the workforce and succeed in your career choice. Soft skills are needed to succeed on all levels.

How To Find Work

With soft skills training, you will learn the best approaches to finding work. This can include job hunt techniques, resume building, application completion, and basic communication skills that are necessary for a successful job interview. Soft skills training should include going over possible interview questions and knowing the best way to answer them. You want to be honest and straightforward when responding to interview questions, so this kind of training can help you prepare for those situations.

When you attend Associated Training Services, you will learn all the different aspects of your chosen field. Plus, you will sharpen up your soft skills. To learn more about ATS, call (800) 383-7364 today.

In a lot of ways, a graduate of ATS Heavy Equipment Operator Training School has got hard skills and soft skills. Knowing how to identify soil, read a grade, understand site layout management, etc. while competently maintaining and safely operating a wide variety of heavy equipment is the stuff you will be doing every day for the life of your job. That’s hard, but that’s why training is important. The “hard” skills are the ones you use on the job.

But in order to actually get that job, you need some “soft” skills. These are things you won’t necessarily be doing on the job so it is easy to overlook them in preparing for a career. But ATS doesn’t overlook those soft skills; they are included in your training. Our Career Services office starts working with students from the beginning, helping to create a plan for what happens after your training is complete. Part of that plan is going to involve these three “soft” skills:

• application procedures
• networking methods
• interviewing techniques

You will probably appreciate the value of the second, networking, throughout your career because it is always going to be important to stay connected to people. But in the job-search sense, it is a soft skill because you don’t use it all the time while doing your job. You won’t be applying for a job every day, either, or interviewing. But each of these skills can get you hired.

They get you hired because they help you get through the filters an employer uses to narrow down who will be interviewed, and then they help you give a good impression of your abilities when you interview. If your application isn’t submitted properly, the computer will reject it before a person ever sees it. If the references on your resume aren’t so great (networking), then you might not get called in for the interview. And if you are not able to show how you will be an asset to the company at the interview, you probably won’t get hired.

So our Career Services works with you as part of the training, helping you develop those soft skills while you are learning the hard skills that will keep you employed as a successful professional heavy equipment operator.