Now, you may wonder how you can best prepare for your future career in such a rapidly changing and unpredictable world. Demographic changes, globalization, and digitalization are having a profound impact on how employees are required to perform their jobs in 2020.
The soft skills that employers require for work are changing as well. Businesses want to have a more productive and innovative workforce that possesses skills that are applicable in many fields.
You should develop a full suite of soft skills and abilities to make sure that you are in a good position to maintain stable and steady employment. By honing the most essential skills, you will be able to show your recruiter that you are the best candidate for the role and will bring value to their organization.
Employers have already outlined a set of soft skills that they want from an employee in 2020. Here are the most important ones:
Critical thinking is a quality sought by most employers of university graduates. It is the ability to think rationally and clearly. Critical thinking includes the component skills of solving problems, making decisions, judging, evaluating, and analyzing arguments. A critical thinker can deduce consequences from what he knows, and he knows how to make use of information to solve problems and to seek relevant sources of information. Good critical thinking meets the criteria of such intellectual values as accuracy, clarity, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, and good reasons.
If you work in education, research, finance, management, or the legal profession, then critical thinking is important. At your workplace, critical thinking can distinguish you as a leader and a problem solver. That is why it is so important to develop these soft skills if you want to become a better candidate for a new job or promotion.
How to Develop Critical Thinking Skills?
Work-related stress is now generally acknowledged as a global issue. The number of employees calling in sick because of stress has tripled in recent years. This problem is getting even worse because employees continually face such common job stressors as monotonous tasks, inability to meet deadlines, inflexible working schedules, job insecurity, unfair performance evaluation systems, poor organizational culture, and many others.
Being able to manage stress is an extremely valuable asset nowadays since employers want to hire those people who can easily adapt to change and endure increasing pressure. Some of the consequences of work-related stress that an organization might face include increasing costs, decreasing performance and productivity, decreasing work commitment, increasing turnover, and increasing absenteeism. Businesses do their best to avoid these potential problems by creating a resilient workforce that is more engaged, more productive and better able to handle increased stress and workloads.
How to Develop Stress Management Skills?
Are you able to come up with out-of-the-box ideas? It is the sort of skill that will set you apart from other candidates while applying for a job? Novel and adaptive thinking will be at a premium in the next decade, particularly as automation continues. It is essential for improving task performance during times of organizational change. Adaptive thinking involves the ability to recognize unexpected situations, decide which response is the best, and perform at a high level under stressful and unpredictable circumstances.
These skills allow you to follow the rules while still being innovative. Organizations want to work with people who can plan effectively, monitor different processes carefully, and shift thinking and behaviour flexibly to accommodate circumstantial changes.
How to Develop Novel and Adaptive Thinking Skills?
Data literacy will undoubtedly be essential for keeping different kinds of businesses relevant in 2020. The problem is that these days employees are not very good at interpreting information and making sense of it. According to research, only 24% of business decision-makers feel fully confident in their ability to analyze and argue with data and derive meaningful information from it. So, employers in 2020 want to work with data-literate people, that is people who understand which data is relevant to ask the right questions, create easy-to-understand visualizations, and interpret the data well.
How to Develop Data Literacy Skills?
In today’s business world, people must realize the importance of effective communication. It was confirmed that thousands of employees have recently lost their jobs due to their lack of social incompetence.
In 2020, it won`t be enough just to be good at your job. You have to rethink your style of working and become more adaptive to your social environment.
Social intelligence skills are claimed to be important in various organizational environments since they help employees to become more productive and successful at what they do. What is more, they are essential for effective leadership and help teams work together. Employers look for talented people who are capable to act wisely while maintaining human relations, have a desire to meet new people, are always ready with proper responses to every query, can motivate and influence others. In other words, a perfect employee in 2020 should know how to be the people`s person.
How to Develop Social Intelligence Skills?
Digital technologies are now commonplace in daily life and becoming embedded in the working culture. It makes technical skills more relevant than ever. Employees are so fond of them because their application can greatly improve work efficiency. Having a workforce that knows how to use them properly is key to a company`s success. If you want to become more employable, you should add such valuable skills to your arsenal as the ability to design and create websites, graphic design, coding, statistical software management, expert data analysis, advanced social selling, and mobile expertise. It is very important to embrace digital skills in the workplace because they can increase business productivity, provide new ways of working, increase revenue, and build stronger customer relationships.
How to Develop Technological Skills?
Decision making skill is required in many different situations across numerous business areas. Unforeseen situations, complex projects, and everyday tasks that organizations might face always need appropriate and timely courses of action. That is why making decisions with soft skills that produce successful results are so critical for any company.
In 2020, your potential employers will make you deal with different difficult situations to check whether you are an effective decision-maker. If you can make the best possible choice in the shortest time possible, you will have an advantage over those applicants who can`t do it. Candidates should also be able to analyze data and predict the outcome of each option before jumping to a conclusion. And it is worth remembering that employers always opt for applicants who can support their decisions.
How to Develop Complex Decision-making Skills?
It is expected that more people will work in culturally diverse teams in 2020. The new globalizing business environment requires cross-culturally competent employees with a global mindset who can adapt to change, learn quickly, and communicate effectively. For this reason, employing people to speak the language and understand the culture of international partners and clients will deliver a significant advantage.
How to Develop Cross-cultural Competence?
To be successful in 2020 means to be organized. Recruiters want their employees to be organized and able to meet deadlines and targets. This useful set of soft skills will help you plan and prioritize your actions and activities, delegate tasks more effectively, avoid stress, and receive greater satisfaction from work experiences.
How to Develop Organizational Skills?
Article Source: Careermerits.com