No matter what profession you’re in, you need a combination of hard and soft skills. According to The Balance Careers, hard skills are learned, while soft skills are “personal attributes, personality traits, inherent social cues, and communication abilities needed for success on the job.”
Funeral directors need both hard and soft skills, but soft skills are especially important when working with grieving families. Let’s go over these skill types, some examples of them, and why funeral directors need both.
Hard Skills
Hard skills are teachable skills that are specific to your job and show you’re capable of learning new tasks. For example, some hard skills for a website designer are HTML coding, Photoshop, and user experience (UX) design. Not just anyone has these skills, but they can learn them if they’re willing.
As for the funeral profession, some common hard skills on the business and technology side of things include data entry, knowledge of software for creating personalized tributes and videos, knowledge of your payment platform, and website management. Hard skills related to the funeral experience are embalming, writing an obituary, operating a crematory machine, and conducting a service.
All these hard skills are teachable skills that all funeral directors should have. Now, let’s discuss the not as teachable skills — soft skills.
Soft Skills
Soft skills are more related to your personality and communication skills — which are necessary for any job, but extremely important for funeral directors. Although they’re not teachable like hard skills, you can work at improving your soft skills.
According to Zety, these are just a few of many soft skills:
- Collaboration
- Critical thinking
- Flexibility
- Interpersonal skills
- Leadership skills
- Organization skills
- Problem-solving techniques
- Self-confidence
- Self-motivation
- Time management
When thinking about who has all these skills, funeral directors come to mind right away. You have schedules that are always changing, so time management skills are important. Interpersonal skills are incredibly important as you deal with families during their time of need. Collaboration is important as you work with your community to serve your families. And there are so many other soft skills that can help you go above and beyond for the families you serve.
Why Funeral Directors Need Hard and Soft Skills
When caring for families during the worst time in their lives, you need a set of hard and soft skills to back you up. Ultimately, families choose to work with your funeral home because of the people. They have a good or bad funeral experience depending on how well the staff does their jobs. You can have all the latest funeral technology, but if you don’t have a staff who knows how to use it or communicate with families, it won’t work.
How We Can Help
Our products are designed with funeral directors in mind to help you achieve both your hard and soft skills. With a Frazer-powered website, your funeral home can save time and become more organized. For example, all Frazer websites integrate with Tribute Center — our all-in-one personalization suite, as well as the top funeral answering services and data management software.
And, we’re constantly coming up with new ways to make things easier for funeral directors, such as with our social media packages. Our social media experts will post on your funeral home’s behalf so you have more time for building other necessary hard and soft skills.
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