If you want to improve your professional profile, there are certain skills, besides software development and the technical knowledge required, that you should consider for this purpose.

Enhancing your professional identity, teamwork capacity and communication skills can really take you a step further in your way to stand out from the crowd. Fortunately, there are a few MOOCs you can take to power your soft skills.

We´ve written about these soft skills developers should work on, and we´ve also heard from Adrián Catalán, Google Developer Expert and Instructor of the Professional Android Developer course, about the importance of gaining non-technical abilities for a developer.

In case you haven’t, read the interview we did to Adrián about improving your Android developer profile. 

Without more, lets view some of the MOOCs you can enroll into for this matter:

Soft Skills

The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) has launched a soft skills program on edX. The program is divided into 6 courses which pretty much covers all the areas Adrián Catalan mentioned in our interview. 

Some of these courses are:

Business Communication: To help you learn how to communicate with others more effectively in a meeting or any other type of face-to-face communication.

Teamwork & Collaboration: Learn to understand group dynamics and interactions, and how to develop leadership skills.  

Critical Thinking and Problem-solving: here you´ll learn the value of assessment and perception, and how to choose the best option to solve a problem in group situations.  

Public Speaking: Commonly considered as one the biggest fears of many people, a great public speaking is achieved through several factors including a well-organized narrative and a proper preparation. Learn how to overcome your fear by taking this course.

All of these are self-paced courses, and most of them have a near starting date you should check out if you want some tutor help during this process.

Professional brand and Professional Identity

We’ve discussed the importance of professional promotion using all kind of different channels (blogs, social network and conferences), and we all know the concept behind this: Personal Branding.

There are a couple of upcoming courses you´ll find at Coursera about this specific subject:

Shaping Your Professional Brand: This course is focused on helping you understand all the benefits of personal branding.  You´ll learn about being valued at work, the power of likability, common errors at work, and how to deal with uncomfortable and inevitable situations in the best possible ways.

Foundations of Professional Identity: This course aims to prepare you for those situations where you meet ethical challenges at work. Understanding your professional identity on critical judgment situations will help you truly know yourself and the values you have. Those who want to build a positive reputation and good leadership can find this course useful.   

Conclusion

After gaining the technical skills that app development requires, some developers might be looking to improve their professional profile in some way. Gaining soft skills can really make you excel in your job or as an entrepreneur.

Who knows? Maybe you could become a Google Developer Expert and start inspiring others in the app development process.