If I asked you today, what is the most valuable skill someone could possess in business today, what would it be? Some might say brilliant analytical or math skills, while others might defer to communication, leadership, or simple cash flow management skills. Well, it’s 2020, so what should recent college graduates or just anyone looking to enter the business market today focus on, in terms of best skills to have?
The most in-demand attributes were obtained by looking at skills that are in high importance relative to their supply. Demand is identified by the qualifications listed on LinkedIn profiles of people who are getting hired at the highest rates. Only cities with 100,000 LinkedIn members were included in this evaluation. Before we begin, we need to break down our skill sets into two groups, hard and soft.
Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills
Experts say that hard and soft skills are essential to have to succeed in today’s economy, with the Pew Research Center, in a study about the future of jobs, noting that, “soft, human skills were seen by most respondents as crucial for survival in the age of AI and robotics.” Not to be downplayed, hard skills are the attributes that an employer looks at and determines if you have the correct ability for a job that they are offering.
Hard skills are an employee’s ability to do a specific task and include specialized knowledge and technical skills, such as software development, tax accounting, or patent law expertise. They’re often more comfortable to define and measure than soft skills.
Soft skills are more about behavior and thinking, like personality traits or cognitive abilities. They’re typically more challenging to measure, but they will help a person thrive in a variety of roles and industries.
Whether you’re looking to hire someone with blockchain background or expertise in video production, you’ll be making sure your candidates have the right mix of soft and hard skills. The lists that I came up with were the most in-demand soft skills, and the winner again is creativity. Slipping in at number 5 is a newcomer, Emotional Intelligence. This ability is crucial in just about every role in business.
Top Hard Skills
Recruiters are able to see the top skills presenting themselves before many in the business world key in on the new trends. Understanding what those skills are early on can give you an edge on the competition. While the soft skills valued by companies tend to change gradually, the most sought-after hard skills evolve very fast, pushed mainly by the relentless transformation of modern technology.
Last year, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and analytical reasoning led LinkedIn’s global list of the most in-demand hard skills. They’re all on the list again this year, but a skill we weren’t even looking at a year ago is blockchain. Blockchain tops the list of most in-demand hard skills for 2020. Some companies see blockchain as a transformational or disruptive technology.
Blockchain has emerged from the once shadowy world of cryptocurrency to become a business solution in search of problems of business. This means that you don’t have to be in financial services to be seeking new hires who have background and expertise in putting blockchain to use. So, recruiters should start becoming familiar with how blockchain works. What its perceived benefits, and who are the people best suited to help your company explore where this new technology might have a role with their companies.
Blockchain is essentially a shared digital ledger. Advocates see it as a secure, decentralized, cost and time-efficient way to track shipments and transactions of all kinds transparently. Skeptics, which there are many, raise concerns about the lack of standardized protocols, scalability, and excessive energy use with all the computers that are required to run the blockchain.
The business world is voting with its jobs, and companies seem to be saying that the potential is worth this gamble. Blockchain has become a category of business for a who’s who of the corporate world. IBM, Oracle, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Amazon, and American Express, just to name a few. Blockchain is now being used in industries ranging from farming and food safety to shipping, healthcare, entertainment, and gaming.
Blockchain for example, is the most in-demand skill in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Australia. Other areas include cloud computing, analytical reasoning, AI, UX design, scientific computing, joined blockchain on the list of in-demand hard skills. As did a handful of other skills such as affiliate marketing, sales, and video production.
Top Soft Skills
Creativity
Creativity is significant, and it may help you more than many skills in today’s job market at least according to career site LinkedIn, which looked at data from its users, as well as more than 20 million job postings, to create its list of the most in-demand jobs skills for 2020.
Creativity topped the list again as it did for 2019. LinkedIn has noted that “organizations need people who can creatively approach problems and tasks across all business roles, from engineering software to Human resources.”
Creativity is important because it is a soft skill that gives organizations their shine or edge. Good companies know that they need fresh ideas to remain competitive. Thus, employees that bring creativity to the table can be quite a talent for an organization looking to gain or keep their edge in the marketplace.
Creativity may be good for the bottom line as well. “Between 2002 and 2015, the global market for creative goods was dominated by design, fashion, film and has more than doubled in size, from $208 billion to $509 billion.”
How to improve your creativity
Wondering how to increase your creativity? Simply challenge yourself not to take more online quizzes, but by learning a new language, taking a bike trip, volunteering, reading more books, stepping outside of your unhappy space, and doing the one thing that forces you to live with uneasiness,” says NYC-based career strategist Carlota Zimmerman. “That experience will cause you to think differently, to make mistakes, to be honest with yourself and all of that will become your creativity.”
Persuasion
Persuasion is a critical soft skill because good ideas are not implemented simply because they are good ideas. Someone must sell those good ideas, internally and externally. Being able to explain your business, articulately has the potential to be a great career builder. Good ideas, coupled with a persuasive argument, can position you for greater responsibilities within your business.
Persuasion is a win-win skill because it helps the company have influential people on the team, and helps you personally navigate your career track.
Other research previously covered by MarketWatch indicated that many people who went on to become billionaires and multimillionaires had sales jobs before or during their climb into the 1%. And sales jobs, of course, require high levels of persuasive soft skills.
How to become more persuasive
Want to become more persuasive? Some options might be that you take a class at your local community college on persuasion or related topics like public speaking. Also, there are many online courses that one could take. LinkedIn Learning offers some, as do Skillshare, Udemy, and Coursera. Other things you can do: “Carefully observe persuasive people. You can watch videos of public speakers who are very persuasive. You can pay attention to body language and intonation to help you learn from them.”
Emotional Intelligence
In looking for soft skills, companies are focusing on candidates with emotional Intelligence for a start. While hard skills are usually specific to a person’s role in their company, the top soft skills, creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, emotional intelligence are needed to be successful in any role.
New to the list this year, emotional Intelligence has different meanings to different people. But Daniel Goleman, author of the 1995 best-seller Emotional Intelligence, has pointed to a mix of self-awareness, self-regulation, social skill, empathy, and motivation. Others cite the ability to recognize emotions, your own and those of others, and to use emotional information as fuel for productive thinking and behavior.
You can screen applicants for EQ by simply asking targeted questions, such as how the candidate handled a previous mistake or what motivates them, giving candidates personality assessments; or bringing them on for short-term projects. Managers can also build emotional Intelligence on their current teams by modeling appropriate behavior, giving regular feedback that is fact-based and providing assertiveness training.
Emotional Intelligence might not be necessary for the people you’re recruiting today, but It’s critical in your role as an employer to look for this ever-important soft skill. Everyone has some level of EQ, but there are some practices you can adopt to sharpen yours. They range from embracing criticism as a learning opportunity to exploring the “why” in every situation.
With your emotional Intelligence honed, you’ll be ready to find and attract candidates with precisely the skills your organization needs most, whether they’re completely old school like sales and business analysis or something like new age as blockchain and cloud computing.
Listening
If there was just one thing you could improve upon that is guaranteed to make you more successful, would you do it? Well, then listen up. Really…. listen up.
The better we listen, the more others appreciate us, and in return, they are more likely to listen to us. By listening better, we learn more and misread others less. Some people are naturally good listeners, but the truth to listening is an acquired skill. One that, if you master, will yield great results.
Let’s look at some of the bad habits that get in the way of effective listening. Which ones might you be guilty of?
Multi-tasking- Do you ever look at your phone or check emails during a conversation? If you think you can perform at a high level, stop it, you can’t, as many studies have proven. Besides, it’s painfully apparent to the other person when you are distracted.
It’s all about me – If your concern is how others perceive you, what you’ll say and the tone that you use, then you can’t focus on what is being said by others.
Brain Speed- If our thoughts wander while speaking to someone, or we interrupt the other person because we believe we know what the person is trying to say, but taking too long to say it. Then you are not performing active listening.
Hearing loss- Enough said on this. If you can’t hear someone, their message will be lost entirely.
Butting in- You’re bored with the subject, so you interrupt and introduce a new topic. Or worse, you start talking about yourself. This will make you the outcast of the office really fast.
Solution
If you fall prey to some of the issues mentioned earlier, then there are a few things that you can do that will dramatically improve your listening skills.
Paying attention- The most important thing you can do to improve your ability as a listener is to give the other person your undivided attention.
Listen with your voice- Paraphrasing someone’s conversation is a great way to let the other person know that you’re listening to them intently. This is also called “Active Listening.” Merely repeating the last thought the other person said is a great way to improve your active listening skills. If you’ve heard the other person correctly, they will generally respond with an enthusiastic yes or nod. If you’ve misheard it, they’ll know they need to clarify. Paraphrasing allows you to restate what they said, so accurate and meaningful communications take place.
Body language- Lean forward, eyes forward, and listen with open arms. When your body conveys a listening posture, others become more comfortable. In a business meeting, it shows that you’re interested and helps you stay focused. If appropriate, take notes.
Nodding and smiling are also a key component of your listening posture. Smiles are contagious and make others feel comfortable, and the more comfortable we are, the better we communicate. Establish and maintain eye contact. Not only is this reassuring to the other person, but it enables you to read their body language, which can convey more than their words.
Be quiet and don’t interrupt. You dislike being told this as do others because it’s rude, as many mothers use to say. Unless you’re seeing a disaster behind the person speaking, let them finish. Encourage them to fill out their thoughts by answering, “tell me more.” When we interrupt, the other person loses their focus, and we lose the opportunity to understand what they’re trying to convey adequately. Make a conscious effort to see how often you interrupt others over the course of a day.
Ask questions – In the words of Stephen Covey, “Seek first to understand, then be understood.” This involves a profound mind shift. We typically seek first to be understood, but most people do not listen with the intent to understand. They’re simply listening with the intent to reply. They are either speaking or preparing to speak.”
Talk less- Again, this is something everyone knows. It’s the implementation of this that gets in the way.
There you have it. In the business world, hard skills will get you into the door, but it’s the soft skills that will help you with a promotion and overall career growth. We didn’t go into all the top skills but just hit on some of the most critical according to LinkedIn. Both hard and soft skills are important, but it does seem that businesses are changing their focus more toward soft skills. Below are the top five hard and soft skills again, according to LinkedIn.
If there are any skills which you feel are important, please feel free to let me know what they are in the comment section and again thanks for reading. Hope you found this helpful.
Five most in-demand soft skills:
1. Creativity
2. Persuasion
3. Collaboration
4. Adaptability
5. Emotional Intelligence
Five most in-demand hard skills:
1. Blockchain expertise
2. Cloud computing
3. Analytical reasoning
4. Artificial Intelligence
5. UX design