5 most wanted skills for the post-pandemic world
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that diploma (aside from Ivy League that continues showing it's value) and being a yes-no man is no longer enough for the business growth. Companies like Google and Tesla are opened about not prioritizing education when it comes to recruitment, but mostly experience, potential and mindset. Many Canadian companies are starting to adopt the ideas of industry leaders like Elon Musk and strive to hire people who want to revolutionize the way we live. Due to the pandemic, many businesses are adapting ways to save money. Departments are shrinking, teams are getting smaller and filled with people who can research, collect, analyze, think through and make the best decision on their own, the "all-in-one people." If you are planning to grow professionally in the next five years, these are the skills you should start working on today. The good thing about any skill is that it can be developed. To avoid sugar coding, I'll give it to you straight up, without these in-demand skills, you won't stand a chance in leading the industry.
COLLABORATION
Collaboration skills are the soft skills developed between individuals and teams to interact, engage, and synergize while working towards a common goal.
Social media and technologies have put connectivity on steroids and made collaboration more integral to business than ever. Employees today must be able to harness ideas, people, and resources from across boundaries of all kinds as well as build strong connections both inside and outside their organizations.
Building a collaboration skill is far from a one-time task. This is a practice you can keep improving on, and one of the best places to start is working with what you have. Ask yourself:
Do you persuade others by engaging them in discussion and appealing to their self-interests? LinkedIn can become your go-to platform when it comes to engaging with professionals.
Do you coach and mentor others with compassion and personally invest time and energy in mentoring? Give volunteering a round of applause since it is the most productive platform for tryouts and skill development in addition to investing in the community.
Do you provide feedback that people find helpful for their professional development? Just read an amazing book or watched a documentary, share the review.
CRITICAL THINKING
Critical thinking is the ability to think in an organized and rational manner to understand connections between ideas and/or facts. Critical thinking, or as I call it "the art of reasoning", ranks among the most in-demand skills for post-COVID times. Lots of people avoid thinking critically because it seems to them the word critical involves negativity almost by definition; criticism is fault-finding and a critic is a fault-finder. However, this myth comes out of a misunderstanding of the word critical. The word critical derived from the Greek word kritikos for "discernment" or "the ability to judge", which in turn derives from the Greek word krinein for "decision-making". This is the way to understand critical thinking. It is all about decision making.
When you think critically, you’ll constantly challenge what seems given. When you do your job, even if something appears to be functioning properly, critical thinking helps you try and identify new, better solutions. Becoming a critical thinker is all about practice. There are certain brain muscles you need to build over time. From my practice, there is one exercise in particular that I'd like to highlight: thinking in reverse. The basic idea is that you flip what you think you know on its head. So, if you think it's pretty obvious that A causes B, ask yourself "But what if B caused A?"
Remember the chicken and an egg case? You initially think you’re sure that the chicken is the one who comes first because the egg needs to be laid by the chicken. However, once you consider that the chicken itself needed to originate somewhere, it’s no longer so clear. Thinking in reverse won’t always get you an immediate solution to a problem. However, it jolts you out of perceiving the problem in the same old way, which is often all you need to get onto the road to success.
SELF-LEADERSHIP SKILLS
We used to hear the importance of developing leadership skills for building a successful career. While leadership focuses on how one influences others, self-leadership is about observing and managing oneself. The skill that is fundamental for working remotely without 9 to 5 supervision. Self-leadership helps employees become more self-aware, disciplined, and build stronger relationships. By hiring self-leaders, organizations become more customers driven, cost-effective, innovative, and effective. People who understand the importance of self-leadership are truly self-aware and make great managers, entrepreneurs, and mentors.
Self-leadership has several components. The one quality you will find in every self-led person is developing awareness. It is also what I would recommend starting with. To be a high-value employee, you need to be aware of your skills, limitations, characteristics—in a single word, you need to be self-aware. Self-awareness is the ability to label, recognize, and understand your own emotions, recognizing how they affect your thoughts, behaviours, and decisions. With such knowledge, you'll know the way to be best managed, what tasks you can perform better than anyone and where you need to ask for help.
ADAPTABILITY
Adaptability in the workplace means being able to change to become successful. Lately, adaptability became a soft skill that employers are requesting when hiring candidates. They want employees to be able to manage unusual circumstances where there are no explicit instructions, rest upon their judgment and have the confidence to make difficult decisions. If you are a person who learns quickly, it is because you know how to adapt. You can further nurture your adaptability skills by trying new things and challenging your ability to problem solve in various circumstances.
Learn from others. You don't need to go far to find examplers, just look around your organization. Take notes when your colleagues exhibit the adaptability skills you’re keen to learn or ask them directly for tips and guidance. While you can learn from people both inside and external to your organization, if you’re learning from those internally, you’ll get the added benefit of learning how the skills are applied best to the organization, its values and its people.
Make mistakes. I could've said- learn new things because new experiences and mistakes come in a package deal. Making mistakes is not just a very human and very real thing, but also a sign that you actually trying new things. While making an error can be frustrating, it’s how you manage the aftermath that counts. Analyze your mistakes and add the result to your "lessons learned" list.
Ask questions. While new experiences and mistakes go hand in hand, asking questions and success make quite a tandem itself. Just as they must embrace change to grow, the best leaders and organizations among us usually haven’t achieved success by working alone. They have inspiring mentors, innovative colleagues and gifted networks they can lean on for support, ask a question of and debate ideas with. Asking questions is a great way to learn more and challenge established ways of doing things, a key component of being adaptable.
EI
Yes, you read it right. EI aka Emotional Intelligence, made a list, which is not really a skill but very often requested. Before the pandemic, employers didn't put enough emphasis on EI during the hiring process. Due to the chaos the COVID-19 brought, employers are getting concerned about how well their employees can handle the significant change. Also, the research has shown that when organizations consider EI when hiring and also help existing staff improve in this area, the result is more adaptable, collaborative and empathetic employees. So, if you get asked questions during the job interview like "Tell me about a day when everything went wrong. How did you handle it?" or "What type of working environment brings out your best performance? Your worst?" or "If business priorities change, describe how you would help your team understand and carry out the shifted goals" the hiring professional is aiming to learn how emotionally intelligent you are. Employees with a high EI can more efficiently deal with workplace changes, challenging situations and difficult colleagues and they make great leaders. Sounds like "sold" to me. How exactly can you increase your EI? Start with developing empathy. When we empathize with others, we develop deeper, more intimate relationships. Empathy is the ability to recognize how and why people feel the way they do. Empathy allows us to anticipate how our actions and behaviours influence other people as well as our own. Developing empathy skills enhances our experiences, relationships, and a general understanding of ourselves, other people and the world around us.
The above skills are the cornerstone of self-development and improvement. That’s why they’re so critical to have in today’s job market. Learning these soft skills will not only make you a top candidate when applying for jobs but one that can give you a renewed optimism about your work. These are brilliant life skills that have great application in both your personal and professional life, so start developing these skills to strengthen the professional in you. To become skilled takes time, practice, and patience. But something you can start doing today to improve these skills with time.
Written by Julia Holton, Canadian HR professional, writer and resercher.