Are you at a point in your career where you feel comfortable? If so, career development may not be at the top of your priority list. While this level of expertise may be satisfying, it often comes with a price of plateauing your career growth and dismissing the need for career planning. This misstep could be detrimental to your future employability.
The problem with plateauing is that today’s job market is more adaptive than ever before. A few factors contribute to this shift. First, the introduction of technologies, such as AI and ML, is changing the landscape of the workplace in every industry. Secondly, companies are unsure about their future needs, which has forced many employers to adopt fluid business models that don’t include a long-term, sustainable career development program.
Unfortunately, companies can no longer guarantee lifetime employability, let alone offer a development program that offers any long-term internal support system. Employees are often left with an unorganized development plan that doesn’t provide them with the training or experiences they need to keep their skills relevant and marketable in an ever-changing job market.
Furthermore, there is a good probability that if you fail to merge your current skills to fit the requirements of new jobs, many of which don’t even exist yet, you will lose your job or face a major pay cut. Tailoring your skills to match the requirements of undefined jobs may seem like an impossibility, but the reality is that if you want to secure your employability over the next decade, you must have a clear view of what the future of jobs looks like. You must take an outside view of the job market in order to envision your employable future.
How to Stay Employable and Marketable in the Next 10 Years
Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all career development plan that will boost your employability well into the future. It’s vital that you remain focused and acknowledge the changing job market. You must find a way to continue to excel at your current job, while simultaneously preparing yourself for jobs of the future. This strategy boils down to coming to understand and apply the four basic principles of career development.
- Understand the industry you work in, including its unique pain points and future objectives.
- Determine the economic and value drivers that affect the job market in your specific industry.
- Identify ways that the industry you work in is adapting to new and emerging technologies and the changing job market.
- Evaluate where you are on your career path.
Assessing these four basic principles will provide valuable insight as to what career-specific skills you need to develop in order to remain relevant and marketable in your current industry. This is not a one-time process. Rather, you must continuously review these basic principles. This step will give you the insights you need to update and modify your career development plan as needed.
Staying Employable: The New Skills Required to Remain Relevant
While industry-specific skills will always be important, cross-functional skills will become equally important as the job market continuously shifts into the future. If you want to remain employable in the future or even navigate your career into new and relevant economic markets, you must focus on developing these critical cross-functional skills.
There are four main categories of cross-functional skills that professionals should focus on if they want to secure their employable future.
- Human specifics Career Skills: As AI technology continues to improve, it’s expected to take over more and more routine tasks in the workplace. This transition will give employees more time to focus on the “human activities” of the job, which means employers will be looking for candidates with the human-centric skills needed to fulfill these new, emerging jobs. It’s important to focus on building people-oriented skills, such as communication, team-building, and leadership skills, to give yourself a competitive advantage in the future job market.
- Build the right Soft Skills: More human-centric roles also indicates that there will be a growing demand for job candidates with interpersonal skills, such as dependability, active listening, and flexibility. You should also build a variety of soft skills, including problem-solving and emotional intelligence, so you can highlight these skills on your resume.
- Build Hybrid career skills:Hybrid jobs and highly specific roles are also expected to increase in the coming decade. These new jobs will require hybrid skills, which are specific trades of your current role that are transferable. You should be able to apply these hybrid skills into new jobs or even new or less advanced industries. It’s vital that you focus on identifying, building, and marketing these skills to remain employable.
- Understanding AI integration: Unless, you work in the IT industry, you don’t have to have high-level AI skills to launch your career into the future, but you do need to understand how the new AI-human workplace will reimage business processes and change the dynamics of current and new jobs in your industry. It will be crucial to have the ability to ask machines the right “smart” questions and have insight knowledge on how machines work and learn.
In the past, employees could develop a standard career development plan, with the help of their employer that would almost certainly guarantee future employability. That time is over. With the uncertainty of the future workplace will look like and what exact skills will be necessary, a clear career path is nonexistent. Instead, professionals must take control of their own career growth by using insights gained from the four principles of career development and by focusing on building cross-functional skills.
At Tulsie, we help professionals look beyond their current job, and focus on building a career development plan that ensures their future employability. We help professionals identify their transferable skills, determine new skills to acquire, and learn how to market their skills and experiences for the future. By using industry insights and emerging technology, we assist jobseekers in finding jobs in a new and crowded market.
Contact Tulsie today to learn more about developing an employability plan for the future.
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