Want to Reskill? You’ll Want to Master These Two Types of Skills First.
What is a skill exactly and how do you know you have one? There are the four types of skills you need to have to be successful. Two are in short supply, signaling where workers should reskill.
Remember when a good resume used to be enough to get you a good job?
All you had to do was list your education and work experience with a few bullet points to validate whether or not you were qualified for the job you were applying to.
Those days are long gone. Now, instead of just furnishing a resume, many employers want you to validate your skills. This might entail a formal test where you tackle a case study or an algorithm, completing a trial assignment to provide the prospective employer with a sample of your work, or furnishing a certification obtained by a third-party provider.
In competitive jobs like working for a management consulting firm like McKinsey or getting a job at a top tech company in Silicon Valley, aspiring employees prepare for technical interviews in much the same way a high schooler prepares for the SAT. They practice problem sets, form study groups, and even hire tutors to help them.
Now that AI is competing with humans for jobs in the knowledge sector of the economy, it’s becoming more imperative than ever for workers to master specialized skills.
There’s just one problem: most knowledge workers don’t actually know what skills are or how to obtain them.
That’s what this essay will dive into. It will define what a skill is, why skills are important, how you can validate your skills, and what you need to know about skills if you want to thrive in the workforce of tomorrow.
There are four different types of skills. Most knowledge workers lack soft skills and transferrable skills, the two types of skills that will dominate the economy of tomorrow.
ChatGPT defines a skill as:
“A learned ability to perform a specific task or activity effectively.”
It buckets skills into four categories:
Technical
Soft
Hard
Transferrable
Finding success in your career often comes by blending these four types of skills together. Take a software developer as an example to help illustrate this.
A software developer needs to be able to code in a particular language like Java or Python. These are technical skills that involve learning how to use a tool or platform for a specific purpose.
While software developers may code alone, their work is usually accomplished as part of a larger team. Their ability to communicate with colleagues or collaborate with other departments is an example of a soft skill.
When software developers are tasked with developing a new feature, they will need to follow a workflow to achieve their goal. Scrum and Agile are two popular workflows used by developers. Mastering these workflows is an example of a hard skill because they are measurable.
Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, human software developers are likely going to wane in demand. No-code AI-powered tools already exist that allow individuals to build apps without any technical skills.
To stay relevant, a software developer also needs to hone transferable skills. These are broad things like project management or problem solving that could be applied to jobs in other sectors of the economy.
While you should strive to develop skills in all of these categories, much of today’s workforce is dominated by two of the four: technical and hard skills. Anyone can enroll in a bootcamp to learn a coding language. And there is an abundance of tests and certifications you can get to validate hard skills. Obtaining a PMP for project management is one example of this.
This leaves the economy with a deficit of soft and transferrable skills. Ironically, these are the two skills that will be most valuable in a workforce dominated by AI. An AI-powered chatbot like ChatGPT can write lines of code or help you debug a piece of software, but it can’t practice empathy when a loved one dies or help you navigate complex personalities on a development team.
A skill isn’t just something you can check off of a checklist or validate with a test. A skill is something that is a base of knowledge that is highly adaptive. You can deploy a skill in a variety of different environments and contexts, making it possible for you to move with the economy as it changes around you.
A skill is a byproduct of knowledge mastery. It’s not just what you know but how you deploy what you know in different contexts.
Two years ago I was working for a regional bank in Upstate New York. The bank didn’t have enough work for me to do. I was bored out of my mind.
I decided to work on developing a “skill” to help make me more competitive in the labor market. At the time I was working on developing an ESG report for the bank. I decided to enroll in an ESG certification program on Coursera. For several weeks I watched the modules for each class, took tests, and eventually earned a certificate.
Today, my ESG certification is little more than window dressing for my LinkedIn profile. I learned the base knowledge about what ESG is and why it exists, but I never had the chance to implement it. I had obtained knowledge, yes, but wasn’t able to use that knowledge to build a skill from it.
Skills are what you develop after you establish a base of knowledge in a particular field or area of expertise.
A surgeon, for example, establishes skills after years of rigorous study and practice implementing what they learned during medical school. The skill to perform a surgery – and the aptitude in which a surgeon does so – establishes their reputation. It’s this reputation – rather than a resume – that surgeons can leverage to earn a higher wage or negotiate better working conditions.
Skills take years to cultivate. A certification program can help, but that isn’t always sufficient to really master a skill. Becoming a high performer requires a commitment to mastery that few individuals are willing to undertake.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that it takes 10,000 hours to establish expertise in a skill. Whether or not it actually takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, this rule creates a measurable parameter within which someone can reasonably expect to cultivate expertise.
Think about it this way: If you spend 1,000 hours a year—or just under three hours per day—working on developing a skill, Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule argues that you can become a master in 10 years.
Thus, skill is the byproduct of the time spent learning it. If you need emergency surgery and your option is a doctor with 10,000 hours of experience or a doctor with 100, you’re likely going to want to go under the knife with the doctor who has more hours under his belt. Why? He’s skilled. He’s spent enough hours in the operating room that you know he’ll take good care of you.
Most knowledge workers have wrongly assumed obtaining knowledge is the same as developing a skill. I, for one, am guilty as charged of doing this. I assumed a college diploma was sufficient accreditation for ascension into the workforce. If I just got good grades, I’d be rewarded with a good career.
That of course, isn’t how it works. If Gladwell’s thesis on investing 10,000 hours into mastering a craft is true, knowledge itself is insufficient. A skill is developed when time is spent implementing it in a practical setting.
In other words, sitting in a lecture hall learning how to become a writer or going through the modules of an online course isn’t sufficient; you have to do the work too. For most people, it will take a decade or two before they’re able to leverage a skill in the economy.
Skills-based hiring is going to be the future of work. If you want to stay employable in the years to come, you have to have a skill that someone is willing to pay.
Not all skills are created equal. Some are more important – and thus more valuable – than others.
My attempt to establish ESG-related skills was in vain. Not only did I fail to find opportunities to cultivate any skills in that domain, ESG is no longer the trend it once was. In fact, a large portion of tech layoffs happening right now involve workers employed in ESG-related capacities.
This is why so many people are beginning to challenge the premise of a college education. Learning about something and establishing a skill in it are two completely separate ventures. If the economy isn’t willing to compensate you for your hard work, your skills are irrelevant.
From an employment perspective, the most valuable skills are those that are in high demand and in short supply. For workers, that means finding a base of knowledge to establish mastery in and taking the time to gain experience doing the work. Following this simple logic will pay dividends in due time.
Plumbing is an example of this. Plumbers have to diagnose problems, use specific tools to solve those problems, and provide on-site customer support to the people that hire them. For plumbers who run their own companies, they need to understand how deploying their skills as a plumber contributes to the bottom line.
A job in its essence is a series of projects or tasks that workers execute. Skill is found in the ability to accomplish those tasks well for a competitive rate.
Because of the emphasis on increasing productivity by lowering costs, it’s inevitable that skills-based hiring will constitute much of the future of work. Employers have already shown their aversion to hiring talent based on theoretical application of knowledge. It’s likely workers will need to obtain proof of their value in the workforce in the years to come.
Final takeaway.
With the number of knowledge jobs expected to decline over the rest of the decade, workers will need to reskill. With AI adoption likely to happen in the next three to five years, workers have far fewer than 10,000 in which they’ll be able to cultivate mastery.
The reskill, workers need to evaluate what the economy needs and what they bring to the table.
To do this, start by doing a self-audit. Take inventory of the things you enjoy doing and the things you’re naturally good at.
Then categorize your skills based on whether they’re technical, soft, hard, or transferable. Figure out what you can leverage now and what you need to take the time to learn.
I’m a writer but I didn’t enter the economy as a writer. I’ve just always had a natural talent for writing.
Once I discovered I could earn a living as a writer, I decided to go all in. Writing is a transferable skill that I can do in a variety of contexts. I self-publish articles like this but I also write SEO content for freelance clients and advise founders on how to craft thought leadership.
Writing is also a hard skill. I can – and do – measure my production capacity. I know how long it takes me to write and the different elements of my writing process.
What I lack are technical and soft skills. I’m still learning how Google search works and am diving deeper into platforms like Medium and Substack. As a writer I don’t have coworkers so learning how to work with editors on distributed teams is also a challenge.
The more time I spend writing, the more I develop expertise in my craft. Eventually, I’ll have demonstrable skills through the body of work I’m currently producing.
As more and more employers shift to knowledge-based work, workers need to take a similar approach to understand what skills actually are.
A skill is a byproduct of the work you’ve done. The work you choose to do is based on the knowledge you’ve obtained and your own personal curiosities.
Your job now isn’t to impress your boss or necessarily go after a promotion. It’s to capitalize on what your good and build a transferrable skill that the economy of tomorrow is willing to pay for.
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