Even in the age of AI, human talent still matters. More than ever, businesses need skilled people to make decisions, execute plans, and perform tasks that lead to sustained success.
That is why the World Economic Forum (WEF) exhorts companies to invest in preemptive skill training and why professionals need to develop relevant business skills to thrive in tomorrow’s workplaces.
The question is, which specific business skills deliver the most benefits today and for the years ahead?
As things stand, there’s already a digital skills gap that threatens the sustainability of many industries. According to the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), 75% of recruiters report difficulties in finding the right skills in candidates for open job positions.
Making matters worse, many organizations also overlook soft skills that help improve overall corporate performance, as proven by numerous research. One thing is clear. The right business skills, including the effective use of online community-building platforms, provide a strategic advantage for organizations while enabling professionals to move their careers forward.
What Are Business Skills?
Business skills refer to learned abilities and practical knowledge that help you solve problems, perform tasks, or create value for your team or organization.
Often, business skills provide an uplift to an organization’s performance in terms of profitability, productivity, or efficiency. They can be further categorized as soft and hard skills. Compared to traits (which relate to personality, mindset, or behavior), business skills can be learned more easily.
Soft skills are informal, people-centric abilities that are acquired and developed over a lifetime. Meanwhile, hard skills pertain to formal, specialized, or technical know-how that is generally learned via training courses, workshops, apprenticeships, and academic institutions.
Based on studies and surveys conducted by LinkedIn, WEF, and other organizations, here are the top business skills that can help you thrive in any workplace environment, regardless of your role.
Soft Skills
1. Critical Thinking
In a world flooded by data, only professionals with the ability to rise above the noise, curate information, and generate useful insight can make the right business decisions.
Critical thinking is the key to making sound judgments, taking appropriate actions, and finding better solutions. This skill is crucial in cost analysis and strategy formulation, among many related fields.
2. Problem Solving
Technology helps solve many problems, but there’s still plenty to keep companies busy. In any industry or era, your problem-solving ability is a key element of frameworks such as 5S and Lean Six Sigma.
3. Focus
Distraction and procrastination are two of the most serious challenges that dampen the productivity of digital workers. Given the heavy toll these issues exact on business performance, many HR practitioners now believe that the ability to sustain focus and concentration will be the most valuable skill in this century. Your ability to focus helps you get valuable tasks done promptly and with flair.
4. Time Management
Related to focus, the ability to keep everything on schedule is a rare and valuable skill. Time management helps you organize tasks efficiently and complete deliverables as expected by your team or customers.
Without good time management, you’ll likely miss deadlines, and your backlog can eventually become very difficult to manage.
5. Leadership
This skill involves guiding and motivating others to achieve excellence. In addition to self-assessment and humility, leadership requires a deep understanding of process and genuine respect for people. As a leader, you need to focus on both the end goal and the series of steps required to get there. This online leadership training course delves into the topic and explores different leadership styles and approaches.
6. Relationship-Building & Collaboration
Nearly all types of business involve working with people. Empathy and strong interpersonal skills allow you to guide or influence others in overcoming individual and organizational challenges. The ability to collaborate helps you work seamlessly as part of a high-performing team. It also opens up opportunities for mutually beneficial interactions.
7. Planning & Strategic Thinking
When you make plans and strategize, you define goals, organize your resources, and clarify the route to achieving your objectives. Without such an ability, moving from Point A to Point B can be circuitous, messy, and wasteful. Planning helps you optimize your resources, manage risks, and save time.
8. Communication
Communication skills have always been on the list of the most important skills for professionals. Having the ability to articulate goals and describe concepts helps bring everyone on the same page and minimizes the level of confusion that can arise when issues are communicated poorly.
Public speaking helps you build your case convincingly before an audience. On the flip side, listening fosters deeper understanding and visibility into the situation, which in turn leads to better assessments and solutions. Storytelling is an advanced form of communication and is a must-have skill, especially for entrepreneurs, sales professionals, and digital marketers.
9. Information Gathering & Research
In a data-driven world, you need to navigate oceans of information to find what matters to your situation, problem, or goal. Because not all information is reliable, you need to cross-reference sources and ensure the accuracy of the data you use in making decisions, solving problems, or making a pitch. When you are in sales, for example, client research is critical in determining product fit and selling approach. The use of tools such as Evernote can help improve your research process.
10. Creativity & Imaginative Thinking
With AI, machine learning, and automation taking over hundreds of administrative and menial tasks, many business observers believe creative skills can help humans remain productive and relevant in the workplace. As the term implies, creativity is the human skill or trait that drives the creation of something valuable such as an idea, an invention, or art. Design is a field where creativity is strongly demonstrated.
