Ever since the pandemic began and workforces went home, we’ve been asking ourselves many questions about the future of work.
“How will candidates adapt to a new environment?”
“Do they need new skills?”
“Will technology help or hinder us in the future and what careers will ascend and which will become dormant?”
One thing is for certain: the Old World is never coming back, and we all must adapt to the reality forced upon us by COVID or be left behind.
Below is a list of skills you will need to have in your arsenal in order to go land one of your dream jobs once the post-COVID work transformation really gets going.
1 Technical Ability
Inherently, human abilities such as communication are incredibly important and will continue to be. However, they will have to be mixed with at least some basic technical knowledge (data science, Java, Power BI…).
And no, I don’t mean being generally “Tech Savvy”. Being Tech Savvy is not enough!
Knowing how to work a pivot table is not enough. Knowing how to convert a PDF file is not enough.
The time will soon come when we must be honest with ourselves; what hard skills do we have? How are they useful to society? From app-building to data science, many resources are available and free to use for those motivated enough to learn.
2 Time Management and Discipline
As many of you can relate, time boundaries were the first thing to fly out the window when our bedrooms became our offices.
It is likely that this hybrid way of working will continue to remain dominant for the years to come. As such, and perhaps counterintuitively, knowing when to shut off the computer to take care of private business will be key to success in the future.
For those of you who are truly dedicated to your craft, proper time management may not be easy: always wanting to finish that task on your to-do list, send that important email, write that last line of code…
And this is where discipline comes in.
To future-proof your career, you need to regularly walk away from the tools as burnouts are famously bad for business. We’re more effective and more imaginative when well-rested and had an opportunity to clear our thoughts anyway.
3 Adaptability
Jobs in the tech industry are some of the highest paid in the world.
However, what is lesser known is that constant learning is required to stay on top of the game, often eating up many evenings and weekends. This need to adapt constantly is likely to apply to more and more professions as time goes on, entering the age of lifelong learning.
Schools are currently not responding to these new needs fast enough, but many companies seem to be getting the hang of it with some offering regular training days. Keep this in mind when looking for your next career move.
4 Communication and Collaboration
Remember in school when you worked on projects and had that thought “I can’t stand this person, I prefer to work alone”. That’s no longer an acceptable train of thought.
Managing the expectations of the tech-illiterate, is likely to become a job of its own – and an important one too, as we grasp that corporate empathy is significantly correlated to worker retention in a job seeker’s market.
Emotional intelligence and social perceptiveness are rare currency. As the projects become more complex and a wide array of stakeholders need connecting, it will become even more so.
5 Problem-solving Skills
It’s true that as physical and manual skills are becoming more automated, we are seeing a rise in demand for higher cognitive skills and analytical thinking.
The reason why is apparent: a machine learning algorithm can do the same work as 20,000 mathematicians but cannot make the inferences and guesses a single well-educated 25-year-old might make.
Critical thinking is not likely to be automated anytime soon and sharpening your instinct for such insights is likely to pay off big time.
6 Leadership
Yes, I know saying leadership is important for your career is like saying water is wet.
However, real leadership and real social influence, are likely to be ever-more important in a business environment where seeing co-workers becomes rarer and rarer.
Working from home more, traveling less, no coffee breaks… leaders able to avoid any apathy from setting in such an environment would be highly invaluable to the executive committee.
Mental health, work-life balance, and a new way of approaching time might very well be the skills leaders of tomorrow will need to promote.
7 Self-motivation and Resilience
Being able to apply the above is not easy.
Constantly evolving and learning, in the middle of a worldwide pandemic requires grit, resilience, and no small amount of self-motivation.
As such, these qualities are likely to remain highly sought-after by employers. This is especially true given that the current ways of working mean that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to always look over employees’ shoulders to make sure they’re working.
Trust is the new micro-management and requires employees who can motivate themselves to work properly.
Conclusion
We’re the ones making decisions about how we want future jobs to be: do we want more humanity? More technology? More sustainability? More innovation? More profit?
It’s possible to mix and match between those, yet impossible to have it all.
Similarly, it’s up to us to decide what skills we want to see most in the near future, as acquiring all 7 over a short period of time is nothing but a dream.
To learn more about how you can boost yourself into your next tech career job check out the rest of our blogs here!
