Know which employable skills to develop
Your priority now and the same goes for all of us is to focus on being employable in the future; not just staying currently employed.
Jobs will come and go especially with automation and artificial intelligence. You’ll lose one job (or leave on your own) and find another.
How?
You have knowledge about your industry, the job market, and your skills and experiences.
There are three broad categories of employable skills that you should acquire in order to remain employable in the future.
1. Enterprise skills are required in many jobs. These are generic skills that are transferable or portable across different jobs and are in demand by employers.
a. These skills enable workers to engage with the complex world and effectively navigate the challenges they will experience and inherit in the future.
b. The following list of enterprise skills is taken from the World Economic Forum, Future Work Skills 2020, Foundation for Young Australians, and education expert Tony Wagner as being vital for the future.
c. They are categorised into:
- thinking skills,
- interacting skills,
- creation skills, and
- learning skills.
2. Technical skills are skills that specifically relate to a particular task, role or industry (e.g., science, engineering, humanities and business studies).
3. Foundational skills cover various forms of
a. literacy,
b. numeracy, and
c. language.
According to Gallup, nearly half of Americans (49%) say soft skills such as teamwork, communication, creativity and critical thinking are the most important for U.S. workers to cultivate to avoid losing their jobs to artificial intelligence. 51% say learning hard skills including math, science, coding and the ability to work with data, are the most important to maintain a job in the face of new technology adoption.
Thinking skills
Thriving in the future will involve a new way of thinking. Workers need to become better problem solvers who will draw on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) knowledge including entrepreneurship, art and design.
Thinking skills include:
1. Sense making – Ability to create unique insights that are critical to decision making. This skill gives us the ability to understand and determine deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed.
2. Computational thinking – Ability to discriminate, filter, and translate vast amounts of data and information into abstract concepts. As the amount of data has exponentially increased, we must be able to continuously update our knowledge base faster than ever before.
3. Cognitive flexibility – Ability to understand and think about multiple concepts simultaneously and generate or use different sets of rules for combining or grouping things in different ways.
4. Critical thinking – Ability to use logic and reasoning to interrogate, evaluate and analyse an issue or problem, consider various solutions to the problem, and weigh up pros and cons of each potential solution.
5. Complex problem solving – Ability to solve novel, ill-defined problems in complex, real world settings and think about how to continuously improve products, processes, or services.
6. Judgment and decision-making – Ability to consider the relative costs and benefits of potential actions and choose the most appropriate option using best available information at that time.
Interaction skills
Thriving in the future will involve working closely and collaborating more with people, managing them, and interacting and communicating with people. Human-to-human interaction will become more critical to get things done. While human-to-machine interaction will increase, robots and machines cannot be the perfect substitute for good old fashion human interaction and conversation.
Interaction skills include:
1. Emotional intelligence – Ability to manage our behaviors, navigate our social complexities, make personal decisions, have an awareness of other people’s reactions, strengths and weaknesses, and understand why people react as they do. While robots will replace many jobs, they don’t have empathy and emotions. Machines can’t read people the way other humans can.
2. Social intelligence – Ability to connect with people in a deep, meaningful, and direct way; to sense and stimulate reactions, emotions and desired interactions; to assess the emotions and feelings of those around us; and to adapt our words, behavior, tone, and gestures according to the situation and circumstances. The good news is that machines are not capable of naturally building social relationships, yet.
3. Working with others – Ability to work together with diverse people of different ages, skills, disciplines, mind-sets and working and thinking styles in diverse geographical environments.
4. People management – Ability to motivate, develop, direct and manage people as we work together and identify the best people for the job. Robots and machines cannot effectively motivate people, develop people, and identify the best in people.
5. Virtual collaboration – Ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a valued member of a virtual team using technologies that make it easier to work, share ideas and be productive despite the physical separation. With the rise of the contingent workforce, we will collaborate virtually using online technologies that will transcend geographical boundaries. Work will become more global; work will become more collaborative as we draw on unique skills and strengths.
6. Service orientation – Ability to actively look for ways to help people, have strong service orientation, anticipate customer’s future needs, and develop new products and services to meet those needs.
7. Negotiation – Ability to bring people together by successfully reconciling differences and resolving conflicts.
8. Persuasion – Ability to persuade others to change their minds or behaviors or adopt a particular position.
9. Oral and written communication – Ability to communicate one’s thoughts clearly and concisely – verbal, written and presentation – and being able to create focus, energy, and passion when communicating. Clear communication helps us present an argument persuasively, inspire others with passion, and concisely capturing the highlights of what we are trying to say including promoting ourselves and selling products and services.
10. Organisation – Ability to plan, prioritise, and achieve our goals and keep work organised to increase productivity and efficiency in the workplace. It includes general organising, planning, time management, scheduling, coordinating resources and meeting deadlines.
11. New media literacy – Ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms that are continuously evolving and to leverage these media forms for persuasive and effective communication. We as digital workers are expected to configure and use digital systems in addition to just using technologies to communicate, find information, and transact.
12. Technology literacy – Ability to comfortably use digital technologies, communication tools, and networks to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, create and disseminate information. With the speed of hyper technological advancements, we need to be digitally savvy in order to survive.
Creation skills
Thriving in the future will require us to develop our creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial mindset and behavior.
Creative skills include:
1. Novel, adaptive, and situational thinking – Ability to think outside-the-box and come up with effective and innovative solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based.
2. Creativity – Ability to come up with unusual or clever ideas or solutions or develop creative ways and systems to solve a problem. Artificial intelligence cannot generate novel ideas, yet.
3. Curiosity and imagination – Ability to learn to be inquisitive and imaginative to develop unique, beautiful, and meaningful products, services, and solutions. By channeling a child-like sense of awe, curiosity, and wonder about the world, we can imagine and produce something even better.
4. Agility and adaptability – Ability to be flexible and adaptive to change using a variety of systems, tools, and techniques. As we are living in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, we have to be agile and adaptive to the unpredictable consequences of disruption and constant changes.
5. Initiative and entrepreneurship – Ability to take initiative, take risk, and constantly seek out new opportunities, ideas, and improvements.
6. Design thinking – Ability to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and adding real value to people.
7. Systems thinking – Ability to understand systems and how they work by examining linkages and interactions between components that comprise the entirety of that defined system including how changes in conditions, operations and the environment will affect outcomes and performance.
Learning skills
Thriving in the future will require us to spend more hours learning on the job than ever before. Continuous, on-demand and micro-learning will be part of our everyday engagement at work. Learning on the job will require us to constantly respond to new information, new circumstances, and new technologies when making decisions on the run.
Learning skills include:
1. Continuous lifelong learning – Ability to learn and acquire new skills, knowledge, mindsets, and behavior on demand and setting aside or reframing the ones that are no longer required. Some people will be reluctant to change; while others will have a hard time learning or understanding new technologies. We have no choice but to work alongside machines or find new roles in order to survive in the future job market.
2. Teaching others – Ability to teach others about something.
3. Coaching others – Ability to coach others to reach their goals and be emotionally secure.