Estimating construction cost, flying an aeroplane, constructing benefit plans, selling a financial products, and doing desktop publishing are example of hard skills.
Working in teams, making timely decisions, and adapting to changes are all soft skills.
Your investment in becoming proficient in hard skills makes you better qualified to increase revenue or reduce costs, which is the marketable value of you. Gaining soft skills makes you able to apply your hard skills and realize that value. Developing these skills together makes you your own economic resource.
Hard Skills
Certain hard skills and basic knowledge are nearly mandatory if you want to be competitive.
Language skills. These are the foundation of all skills in you. If you have strong language skill, you have a true competitive  advantage. The generally poor level of these skills has drawn fire from education, government and business leaders.
Mathematics and Science. These disciplines are the foundations of technology. Scientific breakthroughs still happen in Silicon Valley. However some recent innovations in manufacturing and quality improvement come from Japan.
Investment in your science skills and their application gives you an ability to innovate, to make improvements, to create and, as a result, to be more self reliant.
Computer based competency. This is more than simply being literate. Every part of every modern enterprise uses computers. This change began with secretarial work and drafting. The change is then evident in all disciplines.
Manufacturing schedules push the limits of resource utilization and need online systems to function. Cash management has become a minute by minute activity requiring computerized networks.
Selling. This is hard skill that can give you both singular and added value. The singular value of being able to sell comes from the ability to increase revenue. If you are skilled at convincing customers to pay money for  a company's product or service, you have an in-demand skill, no matter how bad the state of the  economy. Coupling selling skill to your primary hard skills adds value to you.
Soft Skills
Unfortunately a lot of people with hard skills who can't function in organization. Some have no interpersonal skill, while others trip over politics, and others cannot adjust to change.
Soft skills are less easy to define and prescribe, but can be every bit as important to you.
Interpersonal skills. This can mean everything from your ability to communicate to your competence as a supervisor. Negotiating, building relationships, resolving conflict, and establishing a positive work climate are all examples of skills involving your interaction with other people. Leadership is the most powerful interpersonal skill.
Team Skills. Whether you are a team member or leader, these skills are becoming increasingly valuable as more and more companies adopt this form of organization. Understanding group behavior, exerting influence in a group, and being able to adapt your goals to those of the group are typical team skills.
Revenue and Cost focus. This isn't a new idea or skill, but it has now become identified as a separate and important one.
Timely Decision Skills. These are essential to turn your revenue/cost focus into action. You need the skills to make correct decision, normally a combination of gathering knowledge and applying analysis, and you need the skills to make decisions quickly.
Information gathering. This is absolutely essential to decision making. While it is a soft skill, finding, retaining, and interpreting information takes hard work and a kind of resourcefulness that typifies the idea of self-reliance.
Political Skills. These have always been valuable, but with the advent of flatter, less formal hierarchies of decision making and power, you must be politically skilled. Political skills relate to your ability to understand and function in the culture and informal power structure of an organization.
Versatility. This is a skill requiring two components: broad competence and adaptability.