5 Skills Companies Are Heavily Investing In Right Now

We spend a lot of time either researching, developing new approaches to or operating a range of skills development programmes for our clients. The more we work, the more we learn. What we noticed within the global business market was a significant shift toward investing into the development of 12 specific skills, which is what we’re sharing with you today to help you on your way to a healthier and more productive workforce.

Soft skills vs technical skills

When we talk about the 12 most critical skills, we’re specifically referring to soft skills. These are the more subtle skills that people tend to notice as missing only in the moments that they’re really needed, like problem-solving or time management. We identify these as separate from technical skills which are more overtly recognisable and often what tertiary education programmes focus on building: computer programming, speaking different languages or preparing food.

5 increasingly valuable soft skills

Below are 5 of the most valuable soft skills right now, in organisations around the world. Whether you’re passionate about working in charity organisations and social enterprises, or you’re laser focused on reaching board level for major public corporations and multinational businesses, you’re going to need these skills.

(1) Critical Thinking

Often misunderstood, critical thinking is usually defined as a high-IQ activity, but it can be learned and trained. It’s about questioning the information in front of us, whether we’ve sought it out by ourselves or someone else has placed it there. Critical thinking is the quest for deeper understanding because that ultimately benefits us all, not just to accomplish another task at hand.

In recent years various global studies have compounded findings that workers are falling short with critical thinking skills in increasing numbers, especially as the advent of AI continues. Words like ‘overwhelm’ and ‘lazy’ are thrown around in different conversations, but we need to start focusing more on our solutions than our complaints. What’s not going away is the desire and demand, by employers, for strong critical thinkers in their teams.

If you can think critically and ask powerful questions, you can shape the way that people see the whole world, themselves included. Critical thinking means you can see patterns and anomalies, and translate those into social and business impact. Critical thinking connects the hypothetical to what’s real, genuine, and happening all around us.

(2) Adaptability

Most of us have heard the saying “adapt or die” as it relates to nature. It is a concept widely taught and debated in academic contexts and in business settings the world over. Even so, it is rare in practice.

Adaptability is the skill involving the efficient and effective processing of information so that resources can be timeously reallocated when necessary, in the pursuit of either the original goals or an adjusted version of those which consider the adjusted context of a company’s reality. Said another way, it’s about your awareness of change and ability to respond effectively, rather than merely react to it. It’s one of those that we can discuss forever, but must practice in order to master.

The current challenges in the business world, especially with the growing number of tertiary-qualified candidates in the job market, include a disconnect between theory and practice. Many people enter the working world with knowledge of adaptability but no ability to implement it. This is one of the fundamental things we change when we’re training this skill as a part of our Soft Skills Programme.

(3) Teamwork and collaboration

Every single person in the world is unique in the way that their lived experiences, trauma, hopes, ambitions, goals, anxieties and education all show up from day to day. It means that even two graduates with exactly the same marks on their transcript have unique value propositions when applying for the same vacancy. It also means that if they both join the team, they both have a distinct individual impact on the overall team dynamic.

The challenge facing businesses of all scales around the world is partly due to the advent of technology we mentioned earlier. While it’s great that technology can do so much for us, it has resulted in a greater struggle to initiate in-person conversations, present in a boardroom or speak to a conference audience. The more we use technology to mediate human engagement, the greater the chasm grows between the members of our teams.

Hearing each other’s opinions without being triggered, navigating personal triggers without breaching conduct policies, knowing how and when to embrace feedback and ideas from others who are rewarded by the achievement of the same goals as us: these things are becoming harder and harder even though human beings are getting smarter with time. The good news is that there is a structure and a way to learn this skill, so that working in teams can become exciting rather than scary.

(4) Effective communication

Communication permeates every level of a business hierarchy and every business function. Mastering this particular skill can take you further than your IQ or bank balance can, in the professional or business world. Being able to communicate means that you can deliver the right information, in the right tone and through the right channel, to the right people — doing so truthfully and ethically is where the excellence of this skill shines.

Many people assume that good communicators are manipulators because, if they know how to say what they want to say, they can influence the decisions and behaviour of other people. When we train this skill we look at the mechanics of communication that most people miss, so what our trainees are really learning is both how to interpret someone else’s communication as well as how to improve their own. The goal is to equip people with this practical skill in a way that makes all parties aware of each other, and as full a picture as possible before important decisions need to be made. Rather than enabling manipulation, learning the skill of communication protects you from it.

(5) Cultural competence

Awareness of this as a skill is quite rare, but still valuable. Once people begin to see it at work they realise why it needs to be incorporated into learning and development programmes. Especially for diverse or global corporations and workforces, this skill can make or break teams. Each of us follows a culture of our own, informed by aspects like religious and heritage cultures, social and popular cultures, and even legal or political frameworks. We make judgments about other people based on what we believe and understand.

Because of this, when we’re employed alongside people for whom those factors (and the value placed on them) are organised differently, there is a natural tension. If we don’t learn how to navigate that and show respect while we learn how to work together through our technical skills, we create the risk of increasing friction amongst team members. It’s not even only about the risk of arguing and clashing on opinions, ideas, products and strategies: it’s about the way we make the other people in our team feel because they’re in close proximity to that potential conflict.

The other important thing to recognise is that learning about someone else’s culture doesn’t dilute your own. In the workplace we may need to manage how the expression of our individual cultures can be conducted respectfully for the rights of others to also make individual choices, but that expression is not synonymous with actually changing our beliefs. Our cultural competence module is probably one of our highest-impact modules in our Soft Skills Programme and we hope we’ll get to introduce you to it soon.

How do you build these skills?

The long way is to work at it for a long time, fail a lot and risk damaging your reputation. You could read some books, watch a few videos and attend seminars. The most effective way is to find the world’s best experts who have studied and practiced these skills, and are willing to teach you. The last option is what we offer here at The UnLearners.

You don’t have to buy a thing from us today, but it’s worth thinking deeply about what you’ve read in this article and start asking yourself if your team is really strategically positioned to succeed in the next few years. With no obligation to sign a contract, you can ask to speak to one of our team members who’s connected with our expert facilitators, to give you a better idea of how your programme can be tailored for your team’s needs.

This investment isn’t for everyone, though. It’s only for those serious about the quality of their long term successes. It’s for those who are hungry to also be regarded as the best in what they do. It’s for the ones who never stop pursuing excellence.