Top 5 Skills You Need To Survive In A Digital Age

Digital technologies are now a run of a mill in your daily as well as work life. With at least 80% managers needing basic digital abilities across sectors, it’s clear that automation would be big in the forthcoming years, with 5 million jobs predicted to be lost due to it by 2025 as research suggests.

About 65% students now entering primary school will hold jobs that currently do not exist, indicating that in a few years till they graduate, the future jobs would look significantly different from what they are today.

With the fear of machines and robots being smarter and preferred over us, we as individuals need to figure out what skills we can develop to match the level of competency needed in the future. Here are top 5 skills that you must adapt to sustain in the soon to be fully digitized world.

1. Emotional Intelligence

This one right here, is an advantage humans will have over machines or robots forever. Yes, machines can identify problems and provide for solutions but can they cater to the emotional needs of the customers? Interact with them? Motivate a team and boost their morale? Well gladly the answer is not as off now.

According to Harvard Business Reviews, almost 50 years of meta-analytic studies regard emotional characteristics twice as important as IQ to be an effective leader. Look for candidates that possess high emotional intelligence traits like empathy, cultural intelligence, humility, extroversion, emotional stability and curiosity because ultimately it's our very most human aspects that help us lead.

2. Virtual Collaboration

Communication skills have been a constant keyword across all articles on top skills to possess, but now more than ever the need for virtual communication expertise is what’s at the top. With a 44% rise in remote work over the 5 years (Check out 7 reasons why remote work is the hiring trend in start-ups) and colleagues and clients scattered across different parts of the world, it is an absolute necessity to get your hands around digital tools like video conferencing softwares, scheduling and project management tools and messaging applications for better collaboration.

With 40% of workers wasting up to 30 minutes just searching for a collaborative space for meetings, it’s high time you introduce a safe platform in your organisation. In fact companies that use a dedicated internal communication see a 30% boost in employee engagement! No more excuses claiming I’m not a tech person in this day and age, because they’ll come a time where all follow-ups would happen on Slack and you’d be lost with what’s happening!

3. Problem Solving

Future in a bubble is nothing but a lot of uncertainty, while data and research can predict, no one really knows how exactly technology or jobs will change like. But for which one of the skills that if you possess would help regardless of the future is the ability to adapt to new situations and analyse problems in a critical approach. No, not traditional problem solving that follows a linear process, in fact yesterday’s problem solving would differ significantly from tomorrow’s.

With automation boosting, it doesn’t mainly matter how you collect data, because honestly speaking all that would be done by the bots but instead how you utilise it to achieve your end goal and that’s what will hold most value over others especially when recruiters polled by the Financial Times ranked complex as one of the 5 most important skills to find for.

4. Social Selling

With social media booming, value based selling is the only way to catch the eyes of your potential customers and the core of that is based upon trust. To create that, it’s essential to facilitate yourselves well with personalisation in content and storytelling to build for meaningful long-lasting connections(Check out how to use empathy in B2B storytelling).

A State of Sales Report by LinkedIn stated that 77% buyers don’t engage with a seller without talking about their company first (Tip: ace your about us page). Approximately 80% buyers review 5 or more pieces of content before purchasing, which means it’s clear that online presence and content can significantly impact your sales, so really focus on being able to build top level quality content about your company and your on profile too!

5. Mobile Expertise

With the rise of smartphone usage for online purposes more than a desktop i.e. a 51% versus a 42%, a need for businesses to adapt their strategies by  a mobile-first approach where content is optimised adequately is called for with the digital native Gen Z set to make up 40% of all consumers by 2020.

Not just externally but even amongst the team with more and more youngsters joining the workforce, communication through mobile friendly applications is the need for the hour to engage best with them. The information is out in the open, but it’s the ability and competence of using features of smartphones to effectively achieve the results.

Final Note:

The drift is flowing towards change and it’s those that demonstrate readiness to adapt that will flourish. With 6 in 10 occupations having 30% automatable tasks, it’s crucial we attempt to identify the new technologies that are in high demand and implement relevant training procedures to get the hang of them so you can stay ahead of the curve.

Remember, by changing nothing, nothing changes —Tony Robbins