Three skills every employee will need in around five years

The future of work is quite uncertain. Many jobs are expected to soon become obsolete; at the same time, new professions, ones that would have been unthinkable few years ago, emerge permanently. The same thing is happening to job skills: whether employees recognize it or not, some of their skills will be soon rendered useless, while others constantly increase in importance and become crucial for staying competitive in the marketplace. Here are the three skills of the future every employee should master in order to stay ahead:

1. Personal branding

The times where “personal brand” was considered a buzz word only applicable to entrepreneurs and celebrities are over: nowadays achieving great personal branding is necessary in almost any profession. The reason for that is simple: with everything becoming so identikit, it’s important for employee to differentiate themselves from other people providing similar services — or else how will poor HRs be able tell who’s who?

A competitive personal brand is nothing but an essential differentiator for clients and companies — at least that’s what 95% of recruiters say. Given that these guys know about the importance of image more than anybody, it’s time for everyone to take a fresh look at their LinkedIn profiles.

2. Digital fluency

Every industry is impacted by automation to some extent. We all know that it isn’t going anywhere, so there are basically two ways you can address this issue: either you tame robots, or you lose your job to them. The ability to embrace technology and machines, and especially the ability to work (or should we say co-operate?) with AI will be essential for any employee regardless of their field — law, finances, you name it. The bad thing is, no one will teach you that in university or in further education courses.

3. Learnability

Cognitive flexibility, fast learning, adaptability, human intelligence — call it what you want. The most important tool in the toolkit with the “how to survive the 4th industrial revolution” sticker on it is the ability to a) understand what knowledge or skill you lack and b) learn or develop it the quickest way possible. Oddly enough, if you try to google “most important job skills”, you’ll see things like “complex problem solving”, “critical thinking”, “decision-making”, et cetera, et cetera — as if no one realised that these cognitive qualities are all intrinsic to a flexible mind: you can’t solve complex problems if you lack critical thinking and vice versa.

In the end of a day, even basic logic suggests that no skill can be more important than the “acquiring new skills” skill. That’s what humans have been doing since the dawn of times — adapting to the ever-changing living conditions by means of learning new skills. Arguably, they had much bigger problems than finding a job.