Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom A Reskilling Plan Has Become Essential

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom A Reskilling Plan Has Become Essential Back when I graduated from college, one was expected to leave school with nearly all the basic skills needed to succeed in a career. Maybe your employer did a more comprehensive orientation, maybe it provided access to the occasional professional development training course, and maybe you picked up a few things passively while engaging in job responsibilities or talking with your boss or mentor. But overall, you didn’t have to go too far out of your way to learn the skills or competencies you’d need to be successful. Today, we live in a different world. Regardless of the industry, organizations and markets are evolving quickly. The way we do things one day might not work the next. There’s no such thing as a long-term strategy. Rather, every plan must be revisited â€" and goals adjusted â€" annually to ensure they’re still relevant and applicable. And this means that individuals must keep up and master new areas for which employers are willing to pay for expertise. Skills Gaps Are Everywhere It’s probably not a surprise that according to research I conducted with DeVry University’s Career Advisory Board in 2017, most managers feel that employees generally lack soft skills. At all three levels of employment â€" entry-level, mid-level and senior-level â€" managers cited soft skills and traits like integrity, problem-solving, interpersonal ability and adaptability as essential but not nearly common enough in the employee population. Here’s where it gets interesting, though. In a follow-up study last year, we asked 500 hiring managers about the skills human employees need in a world with greater machine participation. That’s when we discovered the desire for greater applied technical skills, or the ability to understand the technology available to do run an organization or do a job more productively. Of our respondents, 75 percent said employees should know how to use technology to inform and drive business decisions, while 84 percent claimed employees who know how to use the right technology tools in their fields are more effective. For the rest of the piece, head over to the SilkRoad blog.