Are soft skills more important than qualifications?

When people think about building a successful psychology career, it's easy to focus on degrees, experience and technical expertise. But what if the qualities that matter most are the ones we don't always put on our CV?

In this episode of Psychology, Actually, I'm joined by Clinical Psychologist Cliff Hawkins to explore why reliability, curiosity, communication, professionalism and emotional intelligence may be the real ingredients of a successful psychology career.

Whether you're an aspiring psychologist hoping to secure your first Assistant Psychologist post, a trainee navigating placements, or an experienced clinician wanting to reflect on what makes teams truly thrive, this conversation is packed with practical insights and honest reflections.

We explore why fresh perspectives matter, how transferable skills can become your biggest strength, why confidence sometimes grows through taking opportunities rather than waiting for them, and why being dependable may be one of the most underrated professional skills of all.

If you've ever wondered whether you're "enough", questioned what you really bring to a team, or worried that everyone else knows more than you do, this episode is for you.

⏱️ Highlights

• 00:00 Why soft skills might matter more than qualifications
• 00:45 Meet Clinical Psychologist Cliff Hawkins
• 01:45 Why trainees and assistants bring fresh thinking to teams
• 03:18 Feeling like "just the trainee"
• 04:44 Why your value isn't defined by your job title
• 06:04 When soft skills become your greatest strength
• 06:47 Why "soft skills" aren't soft at all
• 08:19 Reliability, respect and professional relationships
• 09:43 Marianne reflects on breaking cycles around punctuality
• 11:37 Seizing opportunities and building confidence
• 13:21 Creating your own opportunities in psychology
• 15:24 Why being yourself matters more than sounding perfect
• 16:34 Keeping promises and building trust
• 18:23 The McKinsey 7S Model explained
• 20:49 Using soft skills to strengthen psychology interviews
• 21:31 Where to find Cliff Hawkins
• 22:00 Marianne's reflections and resources for aspiring psychologists

Links:

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Check out Cliff's Website: www.Cliffhawkinspsychology.com

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⚠️ Disclaimer

This content is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute medical, psychological, or professional advice. Any actions taken based on this content are at your own risk.

© Dr Marianne Trent

What if one of the biggest mistakes we make in our careers is assuming that experience always beats fresh thinking because some of the most valuable things you can bring to a team may not be the things you've learned over decades. They might be your curiosity, your perspective, and your ability to connect with others. In this episode, clinical psychologist Cliff Hawkins and I are taking a deep dive into soft skills and how they might just be the difference that makes the difference when it comes to psychology, work, and life. Hi, welcome along to Psychology Actually. I am Dr. Marianne Trent, a qualified clinical psychologist, and I'm joined by fellow qualified clinical psychologist Cliff Hawkins. Hi, Cliff.

Hello, Marianne. Thanks for having me.

Thank you for being here and thank you. We first got chatting I think on LinkedIn and it was a really interesting idea that actually whether we are too caught up in the idea of how long you've been qualified or what your experiences are and whether we should be thinking in different way about that. Can you tell us a bit more, Cliff?

Although it did make me think back to my NHS days and thinking if I had an assistant or trainee psychologist working with me, I'd probably be involving that person in the work. Whereas because the piece of work I was commissioned to do it independently by myself, I didn't have that facility open to me. And I do miss the opportunity to work with assistants and trainee psychologists because they bring so much more to the party and I've always found that I learned from them at least as much as they were learning from me.

Yeah, absolutely. Just before we hit record, I was saying that one of my supervisors during my trainee years had just said, "I really love it when we get trainees and when we get new assistants so that we've got that energy, that new influx of ideas, new ideas of things that are working in other departments that I'm not familiar with or just almost giving us that permission to push the envelope a little bit and bring that and to not think about it as just a top down service where the knowledge is only ever imparted from above. And I guess if we've got people that might be listening in earlier in their career to think that actually maybe I've got stuff that maybe I might not been a qualified psychologist for years, but I've got relatable transferable skills that these other people in the team might not have and that they might think of me as an asset.

Yes, absolutely. Yes. Yeah, I think it is difficult, particularly for people trying to break into the NHS because the NHS traditionally is a very bureaucratic and indeed patriarchical organisation, a very old-fashioned organisation in how it's built up and how it's developed. And so there can be a risk of assuming that if someone has simply been there longer than anyone else, that they must be the best qualified for a particular job. And of course we know from the real world that isn't necessarily the case.

Yeah. It's making me think about a couple of things really during my trainee years. And obviously if you are doing the assistant psychologist route, then you're used to knowing that you scored first or second best to be able to get that highly competitive job and you've usually met the person who's going to be your supervisor or manager at the interview. So there's some aspect of having been hand selected and chosen. That's not usually the case if you then go on placement as a trainee and often you are sometimes called the trainee or the trainees and it's that idea that you don't really have an identity of your own and that you could have been a puzzle piece that's just slotted in and I think that's really tricky.

Yes. Well, it reminds me a bit of the sitcom of Mandaland where the parents at the school aren't talked about or too by their name. They're just Damien's mother or Adrian's father. They don't have an identity of their own outside being a parent. And I think, as you say, the NHS is quite good at putting people into boxes and not really thinking about who people are as individuals and what they might be bringing.

I think it's the idea that you are valued and you have value and that you matter even if you haven't necessarily been chosen for that particular role or service and empowering yourself to think, well, what can I learn? What can I demonstrate? And I think it is really tricky during training because I don't know what your experiences are like and how you've seen this play out in your own training and other people's. But certainly when I was in my intellectual disabilities placement, I was on my third placement in my second year and very much felt I should know more. I'm going out to people's homes. I'm going out to residential facilities as the trainee clinical psychologist who's going to really help them with their problems. But I had never worked in a service for people with intellectual disabilities. And so it was really, I think, a very humbling experience because I had to just think about, I guess, my soft skills, my transferable skills.

And it's very interesting to me that by the time I finished that six month placement, the team wanted to be able to create a job for me to have me back when I was qualified. Unfortunately, the timeline didn't align as NHS jobs often don't, but that I think really did me the power of good to think, well, maybe it isn't the magic things that I might have in my toolbox that matter. Maybe I guess I'm enough and it isn't just the things I've done that make me a good enough trainee and will make me a good enough qualified psych.

Well, I think you make an extremely important point there, Marianne. And I think it's interesting that we refer to certain attributes as soft skills and the implication can be that they're somehow easier or less important than the hard skills. Although actually in my experience, the hard skills are easier to learn. So for example, I've been really struggling to get a plumber. It's quite easy to get a plumber who has the hard skills, who knows how to fix taps and things like that. What I find it really difficult is to find a plumber who has certain soft skills such as calling me back when they say they're going to. And it might sound a trivial thing, but I'm a busy person. I don't have time to wait around for a plumber to decide when that person will come and work with me. I need someone who will work to my agenda.

And so I think we often underestimate the soft skills and the danger there is that aspiring psychologists and even qualified psychologists can neglect soft skills. And I often say to trainees and assistants, the most important thing is to be reliable, which means being on time, which means keeping your promises, not arriving at 10 past nine for a nine o'clock meeting. It doesn't matter how many degrees you've got, people will get irritated if you're consistently late for meetings.

Yeah, because it doesn't feel like you've been appropriately respected, I think. And it does get people's backs up, doesn't it? When I've worked in teams when someone's consistently late or I guess goes out for many, many cigarette breaks and then other people in the team maybe don't smoke or only smoke outside of work hours. It's kind of hard to have that team harmony and resentment can build, can't it? Very, very much so.

Yes. And I think a lot of the people we work with are very disempowered. I remember watching a drama, a play that had been put on by people with intellectual disabilities a number of years ago and the play itself was of case conference, a multidisciplinary meeting and it started and then one of the actors came in breathlessly a few minutes later and said, "Oh, sorry, I'm late. I'm the social worker." And of course, everyone in the audience laughed because the stereotype was, "Well, the social worker will be late." And so although it was making a comedy point, it was a very serious point as well that these people with intellectual disabilities were used to not being respected at all. And although it was a social worker in that scenario, in my experience, unfortunately, it could just as easily have been a clinical psychologist.

Yeah. I think I probably have a natural tendency to be a bit later, but I make sure that I am not late because I was raised by a late mother and would drop me at swimming lessons. I might be on time for the swimming lesson, but she wouldn't be on time to come and get me because she'd be like, "Oh, I can do this or I went to do this. " And she kind of wouldn't stay and be present. And I was used to being dropped off to work late or being picked up from work late and I don't want that to have other people have that experience of me. And I don't want my children, I guess this is how trauma works, isn't it? I don't want my children to have that experience of, oh, well, they're always late because I didn't enjoy that because when ... And I guess this is interesting for a reflection on clients attending services.

If they are younger, if they're minors, that doesn't reflect on them always, does it? It's often about who is bringing them. So I have to make sure that I factor in the extra time it takes to do the things that we'll often forget we have to do, like find our shoes, get our bag, make sure we've got our phone or our charger and brush my teeth and look in the mirror to check my hair's looking all right. So I have to almost make an active decision to tack that extra bit on because it was always that bit that my mom would be late by. And I just don't want that. I'm not willing to continue to perpetuate that cycle, but also I'm not willing to have people hold me in mind like that. Okay. So we thought about soft skills and how they might be very much underrated.

Are there any other kind of bits and pieces that you think we might be overlooking Clear?

Well, one of the soft skills that I think does get underestimated is Carpe Dam sees the day. Lots of times in my career, and I appreciate it helps that I've got the privilege of being white and male and sounding middle class. Lots of times I've applied for things and I've got things and I've been surprised to think, well, I was the only person apparently who applied, even though I'm sure there are other people out there more qualified. So for example, last week I bumped into a support worker who I found out had a psychology degree and I said, "Okay, send me an email and I'll see what I can do to help you. " Now I'm used to doing that and I'm used to not hearing from those people and I always think, well, what an opportunity they're potentially missing that I know lots of people I could potentially be helpful.

Now, as it turned out, this particular graduate has emailed me with a very appropriate email and so that will make me inclined to give that person a bit of my time and who knows how helpful that might be. And I think often people don't have the confidence and again, I appreciate I have multiple privileges which perhaps have imbued me with a certain confidence that other people might not have. However, going after opportunities, not letting opportunities pass one by, I think is a crucial skill given how competitive we know it is to become a professional psychologist, any type of professional psychologist.

And it kind of making me think of when I work with people contact me and say, "How can I get my foot in the door?" And think if someone's already working as an HCA, so a healthcare assistant on a ward or doing bank work, I'm always like, "Well, if you're already doing one-to-one ops or regularly working with a particular client who you know is open to clinical psychology, can you start to say to the psychologists, would I be able to come into the MDT formulation when you are discussing this client?" Because then you're getting that experience of seeing how this is applied in reality, but also that you might be able to feed in your kind of examples and insights and reflections of this person and they might really value that because you might be seeing things differently than they are. And it's not just that you are trying to take from that experience.

It really is that actually we think you've got really interesting insight and you might benefit our team discussions, but unless you think to say that you'd be happy to do that, you'd be willing to do that, that opportunity might not necessarily come directly to you

Because people like you and me have got limited time and we're unlikely to chase people who might be asking us for things, it might be necessary for people to chase us and that might make the difference. Someone who is assertive enough to, for example, send the email after approaching me and to send an appropriate email as well, an email that makes me think, yes, this person I think will make a good clinical psychologist in the future. So I'm prepared to put myself out to give them some help for free. Whereas if someone either didn't email me or it was perhaps a badly written or badly spelled email, then I'd be less likely to give that help.

Yeah. I think it's about making it bespoke and personalised, isn't it? So in these days of AI and ChatGPT, it's kind of easy to tell whether this feels like it's something that's been written

By a person. And so just really empower yourself to be yourself, to use yourself as that intervention, as part of the tool to get you what you want. But I think it's also really important to hold in mind the idea that you're not an extra in your own life, we should be a key player, but to bear in mind that everyone else is the kind of the leading actor in their own lives and they don't always have time to fully consider everyone else in the cast. And so it's kind of your job to every now and then, who I'm here and remind people, but also know that it's okay to ask to have your needs met. And then that gives people a chance to either meet them or politely decline that opportunity. Okay. So we're getting a really nice collection of these soft skills. Any others, Cliff?

I think another one is to keep promises. For example, if I'm asked to deliver a report by a certain date, I will deliver it by that date. There's no doubting that that will happen. And thinking back to people earlier in their careers, that might mean if someone asks to receive some data from you, if you're doing some data analysis, again, get it done by when you say you're going to, because that may be your one opportunity to impress that individual or that may be that you're one opportunity to surprise that individual. Sometimes when people say to me, "Well, yes, Cliff, I'll let you have that by a certain date." Unfortunately, sometimes I'm surprised I'm more surprised when they do let me have it by a certain date because I'm used to people always providing things late. Again, coming back to the plumber, I'm more used to plumbers not ringing me back or not getting back to me by the date they say, so when someone does, it's a nice surprise.

So we're not necessarily talking about who's the most intellectual person to be a psychologist. It might seem boring, but the most reliable person can actually be the most useful person to the people for whom we're working.

Yeah. Can't it just? It's reminding me that I've promised to get some quotes back to a journalist today about a certain thing and I've had to add that to my own Trello board and set myself a reminder because it's important for me to be able to do that, but also I've said I'm going to do that and so I want to be able to do that. Yeah, very much so. Okay, Cliff, are there any kind of models or ways of holding all of this stuff in mind?

Well, one thing that I've been lucky enough to do in my career is to spend some time completely out of healthcare for a number of years working as a management consultant in industry and also as part of that time I did an MBA and although I now work primarily clinically, I still do work organizationally as well. And even when I'm working clinically, I bring that organisational experience and training and learning to bear. So for example, there's a model known as the seven S's developed by the McKinsey management consultancy and you reminded me of it, Marianne, when you talked about soft skills and with that 7S model, which people can Google, there are three what are called hard S's and that's the strategy that an organisation has that then leads to the structure of that organisation and the systems that enable that structure to work. And those three hard S's are all vital, of course.

However, they won't be sufficient for any organisation unless the organisation pays at least the same amount of attention to the four soft S's. And the first soft S is staff or could be people getting the right people in the right place at the right time and making sure that those staff have the right skills. They might come with the right skills or we might have to develop those skills. And then what about shared values? How are those people fitting into the organisation or how does the organisation evolve to take account of new shared values and what's the style of the organisation? What's the style of the person? So for example, someone who's going to work with me will have to be reliable. I'm not interested in flaky. I don't want brilliant flaky people. I want steady, reliable people. And so I think remembering those seven S's is crucial for anyone leading an organisation.

However, it's also good to bear in mind for someone at the start of their career as well because I think at any stage of our career paying attention to each of those seven S's and thinking, where do my strengths lie? Wha can I bring into an organisation? One doesn't have to be good at all seven. However, I guess anyone with a psychology degree is going to be good at some of those seven.

Yeah. It's making me think that would make a really nice kind of way of, I don't know, interacting in an interview, especially for that the end bit that's always a bit awkward. Have you got any questions or have you got anything else you want to say? And actually being able to demonstrate some of those softer skills and using that model, because I always think it's really nice in an answer to be able to weave in a little bit of theory or demonstrate how you can use this complex psychological knowledge. So I think that would be a great tip, an idea for someone. Thank you so much for your time in speaking with us, Cliff. I've loved it. Where can we learn more about you and your work?

If you go to my website, you'll find some things in the blog section of it, which you might find interesting and whole stack of other stuff. My website is www.cliffawkinspsychology or oneword.com.

Perfect. Cliffhawkinspsychology.com. Thank

You so

Much. I'll make sure that I link all of that in the description and the show notes, but thank you again for your time in speaking with me.

You're welcome. Thanks, Marianne.

Thank you. Thank you so much again to my guest, Cliff Hawkins. Please do go and follow him over on LinkedIn. If you are curious about the psychology career journeys of clinical psychologists and other HCPC psychologists, I think you will really like the Clinical Psychologist Collective book. And if you have read that or any of my other books, I'd be so grateful if you consider leaving me an Amazon or Goodreads review. If you are an aspiring psychologist yourself and you love the nuance and the reflection and the ability to formulate that being around clinical psychologists gives you, I think you'll really love the aspiring psychologist membership, which you can join from just 30 pounds a month with no minimum term and the membership really does get real results for people. Check out my Google reviews for the aspiring psychologist website. At the time of recording this, I've just had the 10th person this academic cycle confirm that they have been offered at least one place on the doctorate in clinical psychology.

So they are going to be trainee clinical psychologists and we are not a big membership so that is a massive figure. If you would like to be in that position next year, please do consider joining us. There's no minimum term. You can join from just 30 pounds a month and I'll look forward to supporting you. And if you've enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy this one too. I'm chatting with Dr. Adam McCartney, a qualified educational psychologist about wellbeing at work and how we can reduce burnout. I think you'll love it