McKinseys Chief Learning Officer Encourages You to Develop These 10 Critical Job Skills

If youre getting ready to attend college or graduate school, then youre probably very interested in building a career or accelerating your current one. A lot of the value that comes from earning a degree is in the prestige of the program and the network that you build, but of course much of the value comes from the actual hard job skills that an education helps you develop. The jobs landscape is changing quickly these days, probably more rapidly than ever. Some skills that virtually guaranteed you a job just two decades ago may now be close to irrelevant. What the heck are you supposed to do to ensure that you can survive and maybe even thrive in this environment? In a recent talk at Darden, Nick van Dam, global chief learning officer at McKinsey Co., listed out what he thinks are the 10 most critical job skills of the future. Without further ado, they are: Complex problem-solving Critical thinking Creativity People management Coordinating with others Emotional intelligence Judgment and decision-making Service orientation Negotiation Cognitive flexibility Notice that no specific skills such as writing code or great writing skills are on the list. Those are undoubtedly the kinds of abilities that will help keep you employed for a long time, but Van Dams focused on more general, descriptive skills here. Problem-solving, creativity, cognitive flexibility If you have these abilities, then there probably isnt a lot that you cant do. And, if you cant do something, then odds are that youre probably able to learn it pretty quickly. If you can learn and adapt quickly like this, then lifelong learning something that Van Dam stresses is important should come relatively easily for you. We sometimes use the phrase mental agility around here at Veritas Prep to describe the same sort of skills. Taking it back to test prep for a moment (we couldnt help ourselves), thats why we always urge our students to understand the bigger picture when we teach them how to solve a question. Its one thing to learn the trick, but on test day, when the test presents you with a question thats sort of similar, but not quite, will you freeze? Or will you have the mental agility to adapt in the moment, recognize the pattern, and solve the problem? Also, note that there are many others on the list that one would call soft skills, such as people management, emotional intelligence, and negotiation. The more that repetitive, measurable tasks are replaced by automation, the more that these soft skills the kind that a robot cant do, at least not any time soon! will matter as you try to move up in the workforce. Either you learn how to write the code, or you learn how to effectively manage the person doing the writing. And, when write the code gets replaced by another skill in 20 years, youll have the mental agility to learn that skill or manage that new person with the new skill! By Scott Shrum.