Many people, including me, have conjectured the skill sets needed to remain employed in the future. One thing is clear: Specific technical skills won’t help you survive. With the fast pace of change today, honing in on one specific technical skill will lead to disaster. By the time you master one technical skill, it will likely become as outdated as last year’s app on your phone.
Therefore, I take the same approach when choosing my people. In the first part of this article, I mentioned that hard skills are not enough. If you want to develop an active team who will get on well and cooperate at a deeper level, you need to hire individuals with empathy, intuition or creativity. Here are the next five skills employees need to thrive with tomorrow’s complexities:
Knowing the business will be critical to all employees’ success in the future. Employees who understand how their organization makes money and who develop an entrepreneurial mindset will be more productive, helping their company become more profitable and competitive.
Remember those “people” skills I mentioned at the outset? The ability to read people and understand their point of view will be a critical future skill. Robots or AI cannot do this, and will not be able to do so in the near future. More than anything else, this one skill may be the key to job security.
Following emotional intelligence are people management skills. With ever-increasing diversity in the workforce, employees who can motivate, educate, develop and identify talent will be critical.
Leadership is the next step up from people management skills. Leaders are needed at all levels of the organization, not just the top. Leaders will incorporate all the skills in this list, even if their title is not CEO.
The globe has shrunk and continues to do so. What happens in one city in China or the U.S. can reverberate around the world and impact every business. We all need to realize that daily decisions made around the world have a greater impact on our daily work than we might think.
Whether you are a business manager or a college student planning your career, you must embrace the diverse set of skills needed for working in tomorrow’s world.
With customizable tests and advanced simulations, eSkill offers you a top tier skills testing solution for compliant selection and training needs assessment. You could easily use these assessment tests to discover a candidate’s personality and skills and see for yourself which candidates embody this checklist often desirable skills.
Do you have your own checklist of skills that you are particularly interested in when you are recruiting? Let us know in the comments below.
3 Comments
Soft skills are so important. Just think about the context of going to the dentist. Beyond choosing the dentist with the best technical skills, though, which dentist do you go to? The one who is pleasant and takes time to answer your questions or the one who treats you like a number in a long line of numbered mouths? Great article.
The problem is, the importance of these soft skills is often undervalued, and companies usually provide far less training for soft skills than they do hard skills.
The acts of listening, presenting ideas, resolving conflict, and fostering an open and honest work environment all come down to knowing how to build and maintain relationships with people. I find these skills far more important than the hard skills. Great article.