Saving Money To Achieve Life Changing Goals

Amazingly, at a time when employers should have their pick of quality candidates, finding the right person to fill a role is proving to be very difficult for businesses across the country.

Of 6,000 businesses recently surveyed, more than half said they lacked confidence when recruiting from the pool of school leavers, graduates and people already in employment.

It all comes down to skills, or lack of them; and not just basic reading or writing skills either.  The modern working environment demands a diverse mix of tangible and social skills from it’s employees and failing to take on-board those skills or to convey them effectively in interviews is keeping many people in mediocre and below-par careers, with salaries to match…

Investing In Skills Development

The best way to grow your income is to invest time, effort (and in some cases money) into developing a powerful set of skills that can be used effectively to get your job done well, create a glowing reputation and justify new opportunities and remuneration packages.

“Generally speaking, investing in yourself is the best thing you can do. Anything that improves your own talents; nobody can tax it or take it away from you…

…if you’ve got talent yourself, and you’ve maximised your talent, you’ve got a tremendous asset that can return ten-fold”
– Warren Buffett

Skills Audit

Regardless of where they sit in the organisation, everyone from the CEO to the office junior should undertake an audit of their skill-set at least once a year to find gaps and build on weaknesses.  The infographic below lists the key skills and values that employers are looking for and forms an ideal benchmark for comparing against your own skill-set.

Future Skills

I’ve potentially got another 40 years of working life in front of me and if the changes in the workplace over the last 40 years are anything to go by, things are certainly going to look very different in the future, and I want to make sure I can not only keep up, but also keep ahead of the game.

At the bottom of the infographic there are some predictions of how people will need to begin equipping themselves to thrive in the future workplace.

From Generalists To Specialists

Having the flexibility to be a jack of all trades and putting a hand to anything is a strategy that has worked well for many people, however the problem with this approach in the future is the commoditisation of general skills in an information age.

• Need to know how to run a project – there are a ton of websites explaining how
• Need to know some key facts about a particular market or industry – A quick peek on Wikipedia will most likely suffice

It is so easy, that anyone will be able to do it.

Add to this the growing competition from newly developed countries.  The UK middle-classes rely heavily on the services sector to generate their income, especially in areas of consultancy and financial services; but there is already a huge workforce of highly skilled, intelligent and hard-working service sector employees in countries like India.

This competitive workforce will not be content with just operating call-centres and providing IT back-office service, they will be moving into more profitable areas like R&D, business consultancy, financial modelling and analysis – all at costs cheaper than Western salaries.

This is why the successful employees of the future will need to become specialists in a chosen area and develop a deep levels of knowledge, which will differentiate them from the vast competition.

Being Part Of The Wise-Crowd

We already know the power of networks and word-of-mouth recommendations today, but in the future the structure of corporations will be much more fragmented, making use of world-wide networks of specialists with complementary knowledge and skills to deliver high-value projects and services.

Working within a network of specialists requires a shift in thinking towards a collaborative approach, where work is done for the benefit of the group and not just the individual.  In practical terms, this could be a case of sharing knowledge and coaching others in the network, organising the network into teams to work on key activities towards the common goal and maintaining high-levels of on-going communication.

We already have good examples of collaborative work practices, especially in the open-source software industry, where people from around the globe contribute code to improve products like Open Office or the WordPress blogging platform, and this approach has the strong potential to become common across many other industry sectors – there may even be future co-operatives formed out of the informal networks.

The Shift To Master Craftmanship

To be recognised as a specialist and brought into the wise-crowd networks, it is vital to develop and demonstrate valuable credentials in a way that traditional craftsmen did in the past (What Medieval Master Craftsmen Can Teach Us About Investing In Ourselves).  Too many people approach employment as a drudgery that simply pays the bills and this is where a major attitude change is required.

Traditional craftsmen had a purpose in life, they knew that the world around them depended on their input; so by developing skills and crafting out their own niche, employees of today and tomorrow should be able to achieve much greater job satisfaction and remuneration.

For years, scientists have published academic papers and studies to boost their profiles and demonstrate their credentials, and they are not alone, with many people using websites, blogs and social media to share and demonstrate their own expertise (see How To Use Your Online Profile To Be Headhunted).  However as more and more people adopt such approaches, it will be the best-in-niche, in other words the best quality master craftsperson who will stand out the most.

Continuous Development

Obviously these are all predictions based on current trends and we will have to wait and see how the future pans out, but survival depends on being able to adapt to a changing environment and it is clear that there is certainly going to be plenty of change over the next 40 or so years, so I for one, will be doing my best to treat each day as a learning day.

Share This Information

Please use the code below to post the infographic onto your own website or blog:

<a href="http://www.moneysavingchallenge.com/skills-employers-look-for/"><img src="http://www.moneysavingchallenge.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/business-skills.png" alt="Business skills employers look for" width="600" border="1" /></a>Source: <a href="http://www.moneysavingchallenge.com">www.moneysavingchallenge.com</a>

References & Acknowledgements

http://www.lyndagratton.com/articles.html

http://www.kent.ac.uk/careers/sk/top-ten-skills.htm

http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2011/10/14/58034/employers-say-job-applicants-lack-basic-skills.html

http://www.mbainuk.com/news/Employers-will-look-for-specialist-skills

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