WORKFORCE TRENDS: NEW SKILLS FOR BUSINESS SUCCESS

Workforce trends keynote speakers and future of work experts love to wax philosophical about which business and leadership skills are most needed to thrive and succeed in today’s marketplace. But in the wake of COVID-19 and coronavirus, I think it’s important to keep in mind that uncertainty and disruption will only continue to define the marketplace going forward, as will geopolitical upheaval and economic volatility, meaning most of them won’t be taught in books or classrooms. CNBC’s Make It – which focuses on offering readers practical strategies that you can use to build your career, business, and finances – recently asked me: What talents and skills should you be picking up ASAP if you want to future-proof your career and thrive amid disruption.

You can find answers here in our latest column for the site. As you might imagine, many of the specific items we cite (as workforce trends keynote speakers and future of work experts might also agree with) are less technical in nature, and fall into the domain of soft skills vs. hard skills – not the type you’d be likely to pick up from a formal corporate training program. Wondering which made the list? Among them are such notable picks as:

• Futurism and the ability to think like a futurist, leveraging critical thinking and analysis to consider what’s coming next
• Flexibility, including the ability to keep an open mind and exercise talents such as grit, ingenuity, and resilience
• Leadership skills, noting that you don’t need to have a formal leadership role in your job title to practice and exercise them
• Emotional intelligence (also known as EQ) and the ability to work well within teams and collaborate with others
• Communications skills, noting that any major task today requires us to work together to achieve positive results

Put simply, if you want to get ahead in life and business going forward, you don’t need to be exceptionally brilliant, well-educated, or a technical wizard. (Although it doesn’t hurt if you’re skilled in areas such as engineering or computer science.) Rather, you’ve got to be a better student at the school of hard knocks, and get good about learning how to quickly learn new talents, allowing you to mix and match your resources and capabilities in all sorts of new, novel, and clever ways.