What will be the professional skills for success in the next 10 years?
How to educate young people and established professionals to achieve or maintain their employability in this global environment?
How to face the future with solid foundations and without fear of being out of the game?
These questions are very relevant in the current labor market and it is increasingly difficult to give strong answers given the profound change in the business context.
Job positions disappear and skills that once were highly valued are now obsolete. And at the same time, new competences and professional roles emerge that seem to have a great future.
It is evident that current technological achievements are transforming our personal habits and success skills at business level.
Despite its varied risks, this revolution is a great opportunity with many advantages. Big data, social networks, artificial intelligence, the blockchain are just examples of these new technologies. Its value is undoubted and exponential to boost visibility, increase sales, facilitate learning and access to content worldwide, improve networking, … and above all to increase competition as an influential professional has the same space than a multinational in social networks.
And yet it is also increasingly demonstrated that lasting success will not be achieved only with these valuable technological know-how and innovative attitudes. Emotional intelligence and a humanistic look at work will be differential factors of labor employability in an experience economy where the “personal touch” will be distinctive.
This is critical in a majority of current positions and especially in managers with frequent contact with internal or external clients. A necessary foundation to successfully innovate, make better decisions and, ultimately, achieve better and more sustainable results.
I highlight 10 elements of this “new business humanism” that I believe are basic to future professional competitiveness:
- Self-awareness: knowing the strengths and weaknesses to improve continously.
- Effective communication and empathy: deep connection with others building on diversity and ability to tell stories (storytelling).
- Teamwork: collaborative habits, vision of collective success.
- Passion for customers: both internal and external.
- Curiosity: being open to the world to innovate and absorb different experiences and baggage.
- Motivation: self-motivation and knowledge about how to positively influence others.
- Dealing with uncertainty: effective decision making in complexity by integrating rational and emotional perspectives.
- Global vision: broad approach beyond the area of personal expertise.
- Resilience: good management of errors and adversity.
- Leadership as a service to others: development of people with the aim of bringing out their best version.
Technology and social networks play an important role in today’s world. And at the same time, the “social intelligence” that Daniel Goleman defines as the human capacity to empathize with others is more powerful than ever. In this line, the report “10 skills to prosper in the 4th industrial revolution” of the Forum of Davos points out the critical thinking in an environment of “infoxication” (excess of information), emotional intelligence or the management of people in increasingly flat and liquid flow charts as key factors of success in 2020.
The “hybrid” professionals (technological and at the same time humanist) will be the most successful in the future if they identify and bet on their vital purpose (what in Japan they call “ikigai”, the conjunction between their work strengths, a job in which they enjoy, a role that the world needs and for which they achieve reasonable remuneration).
Its labor market value will be multiplied by combining passion with talent and integrating the best of artificial and human intelligence: the exponential power of analysis and learning of the digital universe and the humanist perspective, putting the person at the center and the technology at its service.
Article published in Expansión 02/12/2019.
David Reyero (HR Business Partner & Strategic Projects en Sanofi)
e-mail: David.reyero@sanofi.com / Twitter: @davidreyero73/
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/davidreyerotrapiello/
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