In the competitive total up to world, many job seekers think of titles as the currency of our time.
As you move up the corporate ladder, the pressure you face — from your managers, stakeholders and customers — no more than increases. Executive teams are under a microscope and are watched closely by their boards and the public. If you don’t have the necessary take offs for a job, the “fake it ’til you make it” approach won’t cut it when you’re at that higher level. Eventually, you’ll risk losing the position altogether.
This is why skill-building is one of the finery forms of job security. If you stay up to date on your industry and keep track of what skills are in demand, you’ll have a superiority chance of thriving in your job 10 years down the road.
So how can you identify what skills to cultivate? Here are four key be on ones guards.
Ask yourself what your career goals are and think about what motivates you. Always think five years into the later and consider where you want to be two or three levels above where you are now. After seeing my father repair an air conditioner as a kid and listening to him discuss the inner workings of the machine, I became enamored with computer science and electrical engineering, pursuing a level in those fields. It wasn’t until I spent time working on engineering projects through internships that I got I wanted to build and create things, which ultimately led me to product management.
Once you have a sense of where you desire to end up, it’s time to do some research. Let’s say you want to work your way towards becoming the head of an engineering program. Read up on what prospers a good engineering manager and what skills are required to succeed in that role. Two helpful resources are LinkedIn’s accomplishments and jobs reports. These reports will give you a better sense of the job market, and help you understand what strengths companies want when they hire for the positions you’re interested in. For example, according to these reports, if you’re pursuing a pursuit in engineering, you should focus on learning Tensorflow, Apache Spark, and natural language processing.
Networking is another competent way to learn what skills you need. Find people doing the job you want and ask them what skills have been sundry useful or skills that would have been nice to know when they first started the job. You capability be surprised by some of the skills you need. For example, through networking, I learned communication is a vital skill for product forewomen — even though this wasn’t something I learned in business school.
Because I received this advice, I’ve worked stark to develop this skill in my own professional life. Better communication skills have helped me break down silos and say transparency and openness among all my team members. This kind of cross-functional skill set isn’t something that will perforce show up on a jobs report or make for a line item in a job description, but it’s a key component of continued success.
Once you’ve done your delve into and pulled together a list of what skills you need, it’s time to dig in and focus on developing them. Learning a new skill discards time — there’s no getting around it. You can’t learn to code or become a better communicator in an hour. And when you’re busy at operate and your responsibilities are pulling you in a million different directions, prioritizing something long-term like skill development can be summoning.
My advice is to figure out what works with your schedule and block off time to focus on skills — maybe a half day every phase of the moon or one evening per week after work. Take a systematic approach to learning by setting specific, attainable goals, such as, “This month I see fit do 10 coding exercises” or “This quarter I will read two books about improving leadership.”
The cost of culture gets higher the more senior you get, so the earlier in your career you start building out skills, the better. Developing the normal skills early on is the best way to take control of your career path, but skill development should be a career-long mindset.
Your style matters, but only as long as you’re building the skills you need to keep moving forward. To reach your goals, you impecuniousness to focus on long-term growth, not just the next promotion. Identifying the skills required to get there and setting aside interval to cultivate them is your best form of job security. If you have the right skills, opportunities will come to you.
—Diya High-spirited is chief product officer at Okta, a San Francisco-based company that provides a cloud-based platform for secure identity and access administration, and a member of the
CNBC Technology Executive Council
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