I’m a sucker for articles on subjects like “must-have job skills.” Even though I’m not exactly looking for a job, and even when the article is a you-get-what-you-pay-for quickie from the freebie section of the Wall Street Journal.
So I was delighted to read that “experts say” that the following four skills are critical for those seeking jobs, or grubbing for promotion, or just hoping to hang on for a while longer.
Clear communications: Since it’s my stock in trade, I am always delighted to see that the ability to communicate clearly is still in vogue. Of course, those vaunted “communications skills” likely have been in demand to some extent since Ogg and Glugg decided to go into business selling cave paintings, fire, or wild boar meat. Still, nice to see that they continue to make the must-have list, even though they’re apparently in short supply, in part because so many of the young folks are capable of little written word communication that goes much beyond 140 acronym- and misspelling-riddled characters.
Poke fun as I do about the inability to write more than a tweet, I have found that us old school professional communicators need to be able to get beyond our love affair with the long form.
I’m a reader; I’m a writer.So sometimes I get a bit miffed that, when it comes to business communications, there is way, way, way TMI out there, and that – valuable as the long form is – you’d better be able to get your story down to short form.
Thus I find myself increasingly adding blog post, tweet, web-site blurb and other small bite communications to proposals for white papers, articles, and other longish pieces.
And when I do positioning work for my clients, helping them get their story straight, I always tell them that we’re going to start with a long version to make sure we get it all in. And then we’re going to boil it down, and boil it down, and boil it down, hacking it in half with each boil-down, until we get down to 10 words.
Sure, I’m always hopeful that someone, somewhere will want to read the whole thing, but you’ve got to realize that today, with all the info floating around, most folks are going to want to go with the Readers’ Digest condensed version. Sigh as I might, this is how it goes these days.
Long or short, verbal or written, nice to know I have one employable skill.
Flexibility. Maybe even two.
The ability to quickly respond to an employer's changing needs will be important next year as organizations try to respond nimbly to customers.
As a freelancers, you pretty much need to have near-infinite flexibility. Thus I am so adept at ratcheting back and forth between writing llloooonnnnngggg, tech-ish white papers and winging off tweets. And adept enough to switch-gears, shifting priorities on the fly, standing down, revving up. That’s just how it goes.
I actually think that having a career in technology, if nothing else, builds your flexibility muscle. Better not get too used to that mainframe, that client server, that command line, that GUI, that PC, that laptop, that smartphone, that tablet… Because there will be something taking its place tomorrow. Of course, if you last long enough, things do seem to circle back on themselves. Isn’t cloud computing kinda-sorta like time-sharing? Or is it just me?
Productivity improvement. Just how “productivity improvement” is a job skill, I’m not quite sure.
In 2013, workers should find new ways to increase productivity, experts say. Executives are looking for a 20% improvement in employee performance next year from current levels, according to a recent survey by the Corporate Executive Board, an Arlington, Va., business research and advisory firm.
Twenty-percent improvement in employee performance next year? Whatever that means. Unless it’s a promise and a threat: we’re going to trim the workforce, so you – you lazy-arse slacker – better be prepared to work harder, faster, smarter, more.
Sounds to me that those old white men are really cranky about the election.
Then there is my personal favorite must-have job skill:
Personal branding. Well, personal branding is sure no country for old introverts. The very thought of having to expend all sorts of energy – energy that would be better spent, well, reading and writing - trying to “build brand me” and personally aggrandize yourself puts my gag reflex in overdrive.
Somewhat disappointingly, the article wasn’t so much about building “brand me” as it was about avoiding professional death by social media. Which is something I’ve been advocating for years.
I do believe there should be a statute of limitations on stupid things said, done, exposed on Facebook or Twitter by anyone under the age of 21. Those juvenile records should mercifully be sealed. I also believe that HR departments and corporate spies should have better things to do than nose around the personal, outside of work, lives of employees – unless those employees are giving away company secrets and/or trashing identifiable colleagues.
Yet who wants to keep employing someone sending racist tweets?
Me, I’d rebrand this skill from personal brand to “being smart enough not to do really stupid things using social media.”
And given the scandal du jour around General Petraeus and his biographing gal-pal, we might want to add the old a ditto for e-mail.
As the great Boston-Irish pol Martin Lomasney famously said, never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink. Of course, that was before the presence of the ubiquitous digital camera…
Anyway, I can think of a lot of other critical jobs skills that should be on this list: the ability to quickly filter through lots of information and figure out what’s true and useful, vs. what’s false or just plain god-awful; at least a rudimentary understanding of science and technology and how they work; numeracy: the ability to create a ballpark estimate, figure out a budget, and understand what a three percent raise means for you; get-along-ability; get things-done-ability…
Hey, maybe I’m an expert.
Maybe I should be writing freebie articles for the WSJ?
No comments:
Post a Comment