Non-Technical Skills for IT Professionals in the landscape of Social Media

Abstract

This paper provides a comprehensive literature review on the non-technical skills needed by IT professionals to work successfully in social media. Previous research has examined nontechnical and found that soft skills such as communication, knowledge management, leadership, personal accountability, time management and an understanding of business functions are important for IT professionals to possess. No study has examined the specific soft skills that are needed in the landscape of social media such as for bogging, content sharing, customer relationship management, pod-casting and project management. This paper will provide a comprehensive list of soft skills and will ascertain which skills are required for specific social media applications. Finally a review of the literature has indicated that an understanding of one's personal brand will impact career success. The issues relevant to personal branding for IT students and professionals will be discussed. Implications for curriculum development in academia and for practitioners will be examined.

Employers’ preferences for IT-retrainees: evidence from a discrete choice experiment

“…To make a selection from the vast amount of soft skills they mentioned, we base the soft skills in our analysis primarily on the larger-scale surveys in the literature. From the literature, it seems that listening, verbal communication and teamworking skills are valued most by employers in the IT sector (Johnson, 2015; Thurner and Böttcher, 2012; Woodward et al , 2010), so we include these three attributes. In the survey, we describe listening skills as the ability to listen to others, such as team members, project managers and customers.…”

“…Various studies on the employer preferences in the field of IT and the corresponding academic curriculum have highlighted the importance of soft skills (Dodson and Giorcelli, 2008; Johnson, 2015; McMurtrey et al , 2008; Merhout et al , 2009; Peslak and Davis, 2009; Radermacher and Walia, 2013; Thurner and Böttcher, 2012). However, all of these studies are descriptive.…”

Demand for skills on the labor market in the IT sector

“…Let I be the set of vacancy identifiers; H is the set of specialization codes; S is the set of key skills in text format. Suppose is the set of vacancies; an online vacancy v is a 6-tuple v = (i, C, d, p, g, K ), where , is the subset of specialization codes, d is the vacancy published date, p is the text name of vacancy's position, g is the 4 HeadHunter API, https://dev.hh.ru 5 SimilarWeb: websites ranking, https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/russian-federation/ category/jobs-and-career/jobs-and-employment 6 HeadHunter API: Specializations, https://api.hh.ru/specializations text description of the vacancy, is the subset of skills (in text format) for a particular vacancy.…”

“…Several authors highlight issues of skills determination in the IT sphere. Firstly, this branch of the labor market has high volatility of technical and soft skills required, and must be analyzed in a time perspective [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Secondly, skills, especially technical skills, have an outstanding structure due to the precise formulation of programming languages, technological stack, interface instruments, etc., so that it is easier to classify them in attribution to several job positions [9][10][11].…”

Undergraduate perceptions of social media proficiency and graduate employability

“…Social media proficiency, a component of digital literacy, demands a diverse set of non-technical and transferable skills associated with professionalism, and interwoven with traditional “soft-skills” including communication, networking, leadership and group work (Benson and Morgan, 2016; Johnson, 2015). Transferrable skills are increasingly valued by employers (Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Tomlinson, 2008; Wickramsinghe and Perera, 2010) and students (Bridgestock, 2009; Cox and King, 2006; Raybould and Sheedy, 2005).…”