This one-day course will explore what soft skills you already hold as a dance artist, how you can describe them to employers and funders, and how you might want to grow them for your own professional development.
Soft skills are sometimes known as life skills, 21st century skills or social and emotional skills. They are key to successful communication, smooth negotiation, thoughtful leadership and happily dancing participants. They lie beneath all the technical know-how that you have, allow you to operate in challenging contexts and help you develop as a self-aware, reflective, highly employable practitioner.
However, they can be vague, underused and hard to describe. Even if we can list them – for example, understanding and appreciating differences, recognising strengths, taking care of others, patience, flexibility and adaptability, conflict resolution – to name a few – we often don’t appreciate when we are using them or articulate them well to potential employers, collaborators and funders.
This course will draw on the FREE easily accessible Empowering Dance Soft Skills Digital Guidebook, created via an exciting pan-European collaboration.
"What skills do we practice when we share a dance experience? Connect eyes, offer a hand, or balance together in a moment? What is happening? We are practising the skills of togetherness.” Soft Skills: Digital Guidebook
This course is ideal for both early career and more experienced artists who wish to develop their practice and learn from each other.
Above image credit: Courtesy of Empowering Dance (archive of the project).