Sergey Turko, editor-in-chief of Alpina Publisher, on which personal skills are critically important for a person now and will remain key in the future
1. Soft Skills. Now only lazy people do not talk about pumping soft skills (“flexible” skills that are not related to professional activities, but necessary for successful work. -). No one argues that in the modern world one must be able to present ideas, be good at public speaking, be able to communicate, have good emotional intelligence, search and filter information on the Internet. However, it seems that when we talk about their importance, we go too far.
As an employer, I get the feeling that many people now consider soft skills to be almost the only important skills, often forgetting that this is always an add-on to fundamental knowledge. And more and more often we are faced with the substitution of concepts and a decrease in the overall level of professional competence: beautiful presentations, road maps, design thinking, endless checklists are crowding out fundamental knowledge, common sense and systems thinking that allow you to create a really cool product or service. This situation can also be seen at the highest level: in the place of leaders, you often see only “effective managers” who are not capable of systemic thinking – however, they are all right with soft skills.
2. Systems thinking. This is a very important thing, and, unfortunately, very rare. Systems thinking is the link between all skills and disciplines. They began to talk about it actively back in the 1960s, when researchers began to study complex systems, including social ones. A system-minded person understands that there are different types of feedback, that any complex system changes heavily, that a complex system, as a rule, cannot be described by one model. This, in turn, should insure against a simplistic approach and, for example, against attempts to measure everything in money or a couple of KPIs. It is also important to remember that all growth (reinforcing feedback) ends sooner or later, and in order to restart it, you need to remove the restrictions (balancing feedback).
A person who thinks systematically will not rush from one fashionable management tool to another. Systems thinking allows you to realize that change is not easy. All this takes a long time and requires the replacement of many nodes, details and procedures: laws, people’s attitudes towards laws, culture of behavior, and so on. Not always even the replacement of the top manager, other things being equal, can change something: the negative culture in the company can be so powerful that it will “eat up” any reformer.
3. Self-education. Learning something new should become a natural process and become a habit. I would like to believe that thinking people do not read because they want to find only a recipe for how to quickly make millions. No book by itself guarantees success. It is the active desire to read a lot and on various topics, to expand one’s picture of the world – this is the sign of a modern educated person. Reading is the most reliable way to gain knowledge to make the world around you a better place: at the level of an individual family, office and work, or even a whole country. Many successful leaders are known for reading a lot and making lists of books they recommend others to read.
In addition, no artificial intelligence can replace the ability of the human brain to quickly and creatively solve problems. It is erudition that creates the intellectual base that your subconscious mind will analyze in order to possibly give out some kind of creative idea. If the head is empty, no Internet will help in creativity.
4. Professional communication and critical thinking. In the modern era of digitalization, we have forgotten how to communicate. I urge you to use every opportunity – to talk, to learn from professionals in their field. True, with the development of Instagram, YouTube and other platforms, one has to learn to distinguish a professional from someone who just wants to appear as such.
Modern society is greedy for PR and a beautiful picture, for external gloss, for likes, recommendations, certificates and other indirect labels. There are a huge number of people on social networks who seem to be making good money, but what they really know how to do is impossible to understand. We must try to get out of this powerful trend of virtual worship of beautiful images and build personal communication with the few who really understand the topic. Let them not be that popular.
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