In today’s workforce, upskilling employees is necessary and unavoidable if you want your organization to remain competitive and profitable.
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As you upskill your own employees or begin to hire more employees, here are five skills you’ll want to make sure they have.
1. Emotional Intelligence Skills
According to a Career Builder survey, 71% of employers said they valued candidates’ emotional intelligence (EI) skills over their IQ. And moving forward, employers are much more likely to hire and promote individuals with developed EI skills.
This is because emotionally intelligent employees foster better communications inside the workplace, know how to mitigate stress and avoid heated disagreements, build better relationships with one another and with customers, and more.
2. Communication and Language Skills
Along with EI skills, employees must learn more about how to effectively communicate with one another, their partners, bosses, clients, etc., as well as improve their overall language skills.
And they will need to boost their skills of persuasion, collaboration, and adaptability to be productive and efficient in today’s ever-changing and agile workforce, which requires advanced communication and language skills.
3. Creativity and Critical Thinking
As robots, automation, and artificial intelligence begin to take over more mundane and administrative-type tasks across industries and workplaces, human beings will need to become more creative and innovative.
In addition, employees will need to become more adept at critical thinking to solve real-world problems and challenges that technology can’t solve.
4. Time Management
As the workforce becomes more remote and employees begin to demand more flexible work arrangements, time management skills will become essential. Employees, especially managers, will need to be able to quickly pivot between tasks and responsibilities as the workforce becomes more agile in the future.
5. Digital Hard Skills
While many employers focus on increasing their investments in soft skills training programs, they shouldn’t forget the following hard skills that most of their employees will need, too:
- Data analytics
- Coding
- Cloud computing