What are 5 Skills People Learn Too Late?
You worked hard to get where you are. But the harsh reality is that the skills you learned in school are only a fraction of what your employer needs from you. The skills you're lacking will hold you back.
If you follow the typical learning curve, you might be ready to make significant contributions in a few years. It's worse than that: Every day, AI is getting better and better at the skills you were taught.
Mastering the missing skills quickly maximizes your productivity and influence, which in turn enhances both job security and advancement potential.
Here's our top 5 list of skills every professional should strive to master as early in their career as possible:
(1) GOAL SETTING, PRIORITIZATION, AND TIME MANAGEMENT:
This skillset is absolutely fundamental to every professional and technical role in every business. Lots of people think they're good at multi-tasking; they aren't. Understanding which work really matters, avoiding distraction, and driving asks to completion before moving on are the foundation of productivity.
(2) STRUCTURED PROBLEM SOLVING METHODS & TOOLS:
The key here is "structured". We see people jump to conclusions based on assumptions all the time; it rarely ends well. Structured approaches like 8D, Six Sigma, CAPA, etc. provide guidance to ensure the problem is clearly defined, investigations are rigorous, and solutions are permanent.
(3) INFLUENTIAL COMMUNICATION:
At the intersection of clarity and credibility, this skill requires applying empathy to build trust, paying attention to detail, and meeting people at their level of understanding.
(4) PROJECT MANAGEMENT INCLUDING SCOPE CREEP MANAGEMENT:
A project is an enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim. Businesses are full of projects large and small. Coordinating resources, keeping people on track, ensuring metrics are achieved, mitigating risks, and dealing with the seemingly inevitable tendency of customers and stakeholders to change expectations or add requirements after kickoff are essential to success.
(5) UNDERSTANDING CASH FLOW ANALYSIS:
No matter your role, the better you understand how money flows through your business, the better decisions you'll be able to make, and the better equipped you'll be to have meaningful conversation with management.
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Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
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