What employable skills do we need?
Here’s the key question to ask ourselves in order to be future-ready and job-ready.
What future employable skills do we need to acquire in the shortest possible time so that we can quickly adapt to the constantly changing business environment and increasing workplace automation?
There are three broad categories of employable skills that we should be acquiring or enhancing in order to remain employable in the future and secure our job and income.
1. Portable 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 they live in.
- Navigate effectively around the challenges that they will experience in the future.
- Interact and communicate effectively with other people within teams, workplaces, and communities.
b. The following comprehensive list of consolidated portable skills has been sourced from the World Economic Forum, Future Work Skills 2020, Foundation for Young Australians, and education expert Tony Wagner as being vital for the future. They are categorised into:
- Thinking skills that include sense-making, computational thinking, cognitive flexibility, critical thinking, complex problem solving, and judgment and decision-making.
- Interacting skills that include emotional intelligence, social intelligence, working with others, people management, virtual collaboration, service orientation, negotiation, persuasion, oral and written communication, organisation, new media literacy, and technology literacy.
- Creation skills that include a novel, adaptive, and situational thinking, creativity, curiosity and imagination, agility and adaptability, initiative and entrepreneurship, design thinking, and systems thinking.
- Learning skills that include continuous lifelong learning, teachability, teaching others, and coaching others.
2. Technical skills are skills that specifically relate to a particular task, role or industry (e.g., science, engineering, humanities, and business studies). It may come as no surprise that technology-centric roles stole the show among emerging jobs in most countries.
3. Foundational skills cover various forms of literacy, numeracy, and language.
In future-proofing yourself, you need to aim for the highest academic background and a comprehensive portfolio of skills and experience.
It’s always a good reminder that soft skills will always be important, no matter what profession you seek to excel in. The ability to collaborate, be a leader, and learn from colleagues will stand out in interviews and even more once starting a job.
Upgrade your skills or lose your job
With technology advancing so quickly and impacting so many workplaces, a big proportion of workers will have no choice but to upskill or upgrade themselves just to maintain and secure their current jobs.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as telling workers to go back to school or university to re-train as a software engineer or a data analyst when they have been initially qualified as an accountant.
In preparing for the future of work, workers don’t really need to go back to college for a new degree in one of those ‘jobs of the future’ that we keep hearing about.
The future of work is about learning how to adapt and transform our existing skills and experiences to new jobs or situations and selectively bridge any specific skill gaps that we may have.
It is important to note that as our existing skills and knowledge are more portable than we realise, our jobs are more related to each other than we might think.
In fact, skill sets of many jobs are portable to other jobs because employers do demand very similar skills.
Portability will the key to the future of work.
Therefore, not all jobs require the acquisition of an entirely new skill set. In fact, the switching or retraining cost may be lower than we think.