It’s a good time, perhaps even crucial, to evaluate your skills within the context of the current huge pandemic workplace transformations. Companies have had to evolve to keep pace with, and position themselves competitively within, the rapidly changing market landscape. This has meant shifting places of work, adapting work schedules to meet the new needs of employees as well as their own and embracing new associated technologies. Covid lockdowns and restrictions have forced businesses to find new ways of marketing their products and services which have driven them online to leverage social media as sometimes the only place to connect with customers and urge them to buy.

Additionally, remote work, hybrid remote-office work models, and flexible work schedules for employees require new approaches and tools to ensure employee engagement and participation. The latter being essential to maintaining or increasing productivity rates, as well as, encouraging employee critical thinking needed for producing innovative solutions to new problems.

Such new work strategies together with new tools, necessitate a different set of employee skills than in the onsite office-centric arrangement of old. Think acceleration of major digitalization of even traditional functions. Businesses that do this digital transformation well will drive engagement, achieve organisational agility, maintain alignment, and empower teamwork across all disciplines and locations. With this, new opportunities will abound e.g., employers can now access a global workforce as well as a global customer base.

What have these changes meant to the demands for skills in 2022?  Moving away from the traditional physical office where all employees engage readily face-to-face daily, new work skills, particularly soft skills, have emerged as crucial to business efficacy.

Skills you should make sure you have or are gaining in 2022 to be marketable.

1)Communication skills and Emotional Intelligence.

When dealing with businesses’ new diverse workforces and cultural differences, EQ is a valuable skill to establish how to give and receive constructive criticism, create wellness at work, and promote teamwork. EQ affects how communication takes place and its nature. People with EQ skills, particularly empathy, are willing to assist others, reliable and can neutralise conflict situations better.

2)Teamwork/collaboration.

‍Connected and collaborative teams can boost profits by 21% (https://goremotely.net). Therefore, whether employees are in the office, working from home, or somewhere in between, it’s clear that they need to be working off each other.

3)Critical thinking and analytical skills.

‍These are in-demand skill traits hiring managers look for in candidates because it helps them to identify and define problems, obtain vital information from data, and develop practical solutions to the problems. They also cause employees to foster habits to constantly reinvent themselves, processes, and procedures. Through this they, and the business, become highly adaptable which is necessary now more than ever.

4)Multifaceted problem-solving skills.

‍To have problem-solving skills is non-negotiable in 2022 and will circumvent the tendency towards self-defeating blame games. The key to a successful team is being able to solve a problem before it becomes a crisis. In 2022 and going forward, a more innovative approach to problem-solving and decision-making will give job seekers an added advantage.

5)Active learning.

‍The past 2 years proved that learning is the key to adapting, changing, and becoming flexible. Successful employees today need to be lifelong, continuous, enthusiastic learners.

6)Self-management skills:

‍These include active learning, resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility. Employers need to know offsite doesn’t mean off-task in these remote work times. They also need to have confidence in their workers’ ability to work independently and manage their own workloads while working in tandem with their team.

7)Creativity, curiosity, and initiative.

These spark innovation and increase productivity, making them highly sought-after workplace skills. They are valuable because the possessor pursues exploring problems with innovative ideas and solutions giving a business a competitive edge.  

8)Digital fluency.

‍On the hard skills side, employers will be looking for candidates who possess advanced tech skills, including programming and coding skills, network engineering etc. Tech-savvy workers are needed not only in tech fields but in most industries and human resources departments driven by the current acceleration of digital transformation within the business domain.  As well, with online and remote work taking off in 2022 and beyond, the baseline for all associated employees in any field will be fluency in communication and information technology to do their job.  

Takeout:

With a greater adoption of technology and workplace flexibility, the jobs of the future will require both a reskilling and upskilling blend of hard and soft skills. HR managers, workplace training professionals and training institutions all need to help people bridge the gaps during this year and the years to come. Having these skills in your toolkit makes you a highly desirable employee to any employer in any industry in today’s digital first marketplace.

Check out the courses offered by H Academy Hong Kong, @happier.io to start your upskilling.