The 5 core skills the future workforce needs to have

There was a time when if you mastered certain hard skills your career trajectory was set in stone, but these days, with the business climate in a state of constant change, a mix of hard and soft skills are essential to find a good job and build a career.

More than one-third of the work skills that have been essential during the last decade for companies are going to undergo significant changes nowadays, inspired by all the technological and social progress. The world is evolving, and companies need to evolve to keep up with the demanding business landscape.

So how can employees stay ahead of the curve and ensure they have all the right skills? They need to begin reskilling and upskilling since they are the heart and driving force of any business. In this article, we at UpTech Sh.P.K have discovered the five most in-demand skills that business executives and managers have in mind when hiring new people. Here is what you as a future employee need to learn in order to stay in the game and thrive despite any possible challenges.

1. Adaptive thinking and complex problem-solving

In this quickly evolving tech world, the need for an adaptive mindset and novel thinking is bigger than ever before. Corporate executives, mid-level managers, and frontline employees should all be able to not only recognise but anticipate sudden changes, take immediate actions, and come up with creative solutions to weather the storm. Not long ago, we all experienced the COVID-19 pandemic, and we weren’t ready for it. However, the pandemic was a perfect example of how adaptive thinking is vital for business continuity. Gaining and perfecting adaptive thinking skills can really help you overcome work difficulties, so you can keep moving forward, and prosper despite all the challenges.

2. Cognitive load management

Nowadays, we are overwhelmed with data coming from various devices and apps every second. And over the years, filtering that information according to its importance and avoiding exhaustion at work has become more and more challenging. As a result, having some cognitive load management skills is quickly gaining traction and it’s expected to become essential for any team.

Additionally, workers who can manage the cognitive load of information get more energy and space to break their conceptual limits and broaden their mindset and creativity by balancing their cognitive load.

3. Collaboration

Today’s work environment is all about teams. Methodologies like DevOps and Agile highly prioritize collaboration, but even the traditional work process nowadays requires everyone to work together. As an employee, you must learn to think about the other people on your team, and the project or team as a whole, more than you think about yourself. You should ask yourself “What can I do on top of my own tasks to help the team?” Do you usually offer help without being asked, or does someone have to ask you for help? If the answers were yes, you are already a team player. If not, ask yourself what you can do to change.

4. Organization-wide service orientation

Having the ability to understand customers’ needs today, anticipate them, and take proactive actions to meet them in the future is a valuable skill to have. In this hyper-connected digital world, we live in, a company’s success is largely determined by the number of satisfied customers and their covered needs. Consequently, it’s not surprising at all that service orientation has become one of the basic skills employees need to succeed.

These days, in order to stay relevant, companies continually analyze the market, detect gaps, or identify new preferences, and translate them into actual products or service offerings even before a massive demand arises. Service orientation skills also enable employees to walk in the users’ shoes and find out their fears, values, and motivators to develop next-generation services or products and gain a strong competitive advantage.

5. Social intelligence and virtual collaboration

Effective communication between employees has always been an integral part of any successful team. And especially now, amidst permanent telecommunication, it’s vital for companies to ensure sufficient virtual collaboration between teams and team members. Social intelligence is what companies are promoting and nurturing among workers in order to achieve effective teamwork and meet the desired goals.

Social intelligence refers to a set of various abilities that determine social interactions at work or at home. These work skills include the capability to understand other people’s behavior, own behavioral patterns, and the ability to act under certain conditions. Social intelligence is also directly related to communication and empathy — the most in-demand soft skills in today’s workforce.

As a result, social intelligence is worth considering, especially by people who want to work for organisations that strive to build a productive team with strong social-emotional and interpersonal skills for the future.

Professionals that strive to be successful in the future should be able to navigate the rapidly changing business landscape and up-skill themselves to fit in the new conditions that these changes dictate. Nowadays workers are already expected to be lifelong learners, responsive professionals, and be able to adapt to various difficulties or emergencies.

At the same time, managers will need to reconsider the traditional approaches in order to evaluate the most in-demand skills for the future and change the way new talents are selected.