What are the modern work skills?

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Modern Workers Stories

5 min readMay 18, 2016

“ I wish I did know about compassion, when I was 18 years old, then I would have performed much better” ~ Kobe Bryant

Some 15 years ago my flourishing career with a multinational came to an (unexpected) end. At the same time that I lost my job, I got divorced, my father died and we had to sell the house. All the foundations of my life did crumble down.

That is when I did realise that I needed new skills to cope with this situation. New skills like self-compassion, dealing with uncertainty, understanding my passion and my strengths. Why had nobody taught me those skills?

As I had always been an intrapreneur, it was for me a natural step to become an entrepreneur.

One of my activities was coaching. In my coaching practice I did notice that my clients became younger and younger and that they did experience, stress, burnout and physical problems. That is sad, that in their twenties they are having these challenges. And again, it is clear that they do lack the life skills to cope with a challenging environment.

As I do meet unemployed people, employees, entrepreneurs and freelancers from all over the world, they are facing big challenges and they look for solutions (mainly) outside of themselves. That is not going to help you. Like myself, I had to learn to look inside for solutions and directions. That is a major shift in perspective.

The turmoil in our personal life and work is largely influenced by bigger changes happening in society.

So how does reality look like?

It is clear that we are in a period of time, which is called ‘transition’, the process or a period of changing from one state or condition to another. We are coming out of the Industrial Age (characterized by efficiency, repetition and thus standardization — building a ‘system of sameness’ in every aspect of life) into a new age, which some people call the Information Age. We are not sure about that name, Information Age, as we see information as, the enabler, rather than the purpose and intention in itself. We would like to call it the Age of Connection (characterized by creation, contribution and thus participation — building a ‘universe of uniqueness’), to be truly connected with ourselves, with others, animals and with nature.

The 6 driving forces in this transition are:

“Deceptive — early stages of exponential growth processes may be deceptively linear
Disruptive — once exponential growth reaches the inflection point, or “knee of the curve,” they become truly disruptive
Digitized — more information is becoming digitized, opening the door for a layer of analytics (e.g. machine learning) to be placed on top of it
Dematerialized — no longer do you have to buy a flashlight or digital camera, you can simply purchase an app on your phone to accomplish these tasks
Demonetized — as manufacturing techniques improve, technologies are becoming less expensive at an alarming pace
Democratized — there will be 3 billion more people on the Internet by 2020, leading to more perspectives because these people will be given a voice in the global discourse for the first time”

What does this shift mean for the world of work?

Check out this video from the World Economic Forum ‘Employment, skills and education’.

“Nearly 500M new jobs will need to be created by 2020.”
“Educators and employers must work together to stay competitive.”
“Current and expected skills gaps need urgent attention.”
“The 21st Century education system needs to be redesigned.”
”To meet the real-time needs of the labour market, we need to develop 21st Century skills.”

The global workforce needs to change as well

“Prospective workers need to continuously augment their skill sets and pick up new hard and soft skills in order to remain employable.” ~ Daniel Burrus, Futurist, Speaker
“Many members of the global workforce can’t keep up with the shift in skills required for jobs” — Allen Blue, VP of Product Management and Co-Founder at LinkedIn
“The emphasis needs to be placed on skills” — Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
“Strong cognitive and socio-emotional skills are a prerequisite for developing job-relevant skills.” ~ World Bank