How are you managing your career? Have you landed your dream job or are you still working towards it? Whatever the case may be, it is crucial to continue growing both in person and professionally because the world is always evolving around us.
As a professional living in the 21st Century, which is evolving both rapidly and profoundly. What steps are you taking to stay relevant? Do you possess the required skills to succeed today and tomorrow?
Each job has its own skillsets you’re required to master to enable optimum performance in your assigned role. But as a professional who wants to rock your career, you have got to do a lot more than simply mastering your current role.
There is this saying motivational speakers always use, it states the difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra. You see that “little extra”, that’s what differentiates you from everyone else and makes you more highly sort after by employers and valuable to yourself.
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The World Economic Forum (WEF) has highlighted a set of 10 skills it says you require to thrive in 2025. LinkedIn also analyzed its data and came up with five skills professionals require to become successful this year. Finally, Udemy, one of the world’s largest online learning platforms, listed 10 skills you need to become a success. Below are the lists, please check and note which skill you already possess and the ones you’ve to work on.
| WEF 2025 Soft Skills Outlook | WEF 10 Soft Skills to Thrive in 2020 | LinkedIn -Soft skills companies Need Most in 2019 | Udemy Soft Skills to Succeed | |
| 1. Analytical Thinking and Innovation 2. Action learning strategies 3. Creativity, Originality, and Initiative. Technology Design and Programming 5. Critical Thinking and Analysis 6. Complex problem solving 7. Complex problem solving 8. Emotional Intelligence 9. Reasoning, Problem-solving, and ideation 10. System Analysis and Evaluation | 1. Complex Problem solving 2. Critical Thinking 3. Creativity 4. People Management 5. Coordinating with others 6. Emotional Intelligence 7. Judgment and Decision Making 8. Service Orientation 9. Negotiation 10. Cognitive Flexibility | 1. Creativity 2. Persuasion 3. Collaboration 4. Adaptability 5. Time Management | 1. Conflict Management 2. Time Management 3. Stress Management 4.Communication Skills 5. Company Culture 6. Customer Service 7. Emotional Intelligence 8. Personal Productivity 9. Storytelling 10. Change Management |
The secret to learning the skills you need to rock your career
Just looking at the skills listed above is immense and can discourage you if you’re not the kind of person who takes charge. Don’t worry so much about it because there is a secret I’d like to share with you. You’ll up your skill and learn new skills that’d change your entire working life, so it’s vital to learn how to learn. But, there is something else even more crucial, and that’s the secret I mentioned earlier. It’s that little extra you can bring to any table related to your career progression.
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Every skill you wish to master has a set of foundational ideas it was built on
To master that needed skill, you need to study and comprehend the foundational ideas of the contextual skill, as well as the history of the skill. You need to learn how to discipline your thinking within that area of knowledge. If you want to master taking decisions quickly, you MUST answer the questions, “What is decision making?”, “How can I make decisions faster?” And you need to think like a quick decision taker while at it.
To conquer quick decision making, you’ve to study its history and understand the foundational ideas and history of rapid decision-making, this gives you an avenue to gather every new and innovative concept you come across as you are studying and trying to boost your quick decision-making prowess.
Bill Gates on the secret to retaining and utilizing the knowledge you gain as you read
Bill Gates shares a similar ideology about learning and mastering skills. He’s someone who reads on average 50 books annually. Yet, he keeps and utilizes most of the information he gets from reading. How does he do it?
He understands the secret I shared with you. Some time ago in an interview, Bill Gates said not to read in a vacuum. He explicitly reiterated on how you should find ways to connect every new information to what you already know.
If you’re studying science, he says it’s paramount to assimilate the history of science. What scientific tools was used? What progress has been made? Study the timeline for scientific knowledge.
Bill Gates added that it’s seamless to maintain incremental knowledge when you understand and have mastered the foundational knowledge.
When learning a new skill, search for interrelationships between them. This enables you to master them. For example, decision-making, problem-solving, creativity, and critical thinking are related skills, so it makes more sense to learn them together.
Learning new skills
I discovered this secret some time ago lying around the internet. However, I didn’t really understand the significance of the words until very recently. Once you understand the history of any skill or subject when reading a related book, you’d seamlessly be able to put the new information in context.
Just because of the Bill Gates interview, I realized that I needed to learn more about the history of knowledge to make learning any subject or skill easier for me.
My advice is to buy a few books on the history of whatever skills you need to improve and understand it all, if you’re confused about what book to buy, google the topic and read the table of contents of a few of the books to see which ones grab your attention and will serve you best.
Explore various strategies on learning how to learn effectively as well as the history of knowledge. Then you could invest some time to learn the new skills required to rock your career. If you follow this process, you’d not feel discouraged and anxious and it’d help you learn skills faster.