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What Skill Development Really Means and Why It’s Important for Success

What Skill Development Really Means and Why It’s Important for Success

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Sweta Mishra

Last updated:

9th Oct, 2017

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What Skill Development Really Means and Why It’s Important for Success

Skill development is no longer a matter of choice. It is imperative to adapt, survive and succeed. We work in an era where dealing with ambiguity and disruptive trends are pivotal to success. In parallel to maintaining an academic awareness of your field, you have to review the career eco-system. Adapting skills and attitude is now inevitable to succeed in the years to come.

We work in an era where dealing with ambiguity and disruptive trends are pivotal to success. In parallel to maintaining an academic awareness of your field, you have to constantly review the career ecosystem. Adapting skills and attitudes is now inevitable to success, and will prove all the more critical in the years to come.
Let’s start with a basic question – what is skill development? In a fundamental way, skill development for a learner could mean four things:

The skills or knowledge you acquire as a part of your academic qualification.
Any other skill you invest in, to stay future-ready.
Any skill you pursue as a passion.
Natural behavioral strengths.

While discussing skill development, it would make sense to start with academic qualifications. Then, we can examine some more aspects which impart skills in the contemporary business environment.

Academic qualification – an initial impetus

A degree from a reputed institution is definitely an advantage and acts as an initial impetus. Right from interviews with reputed companies on campus, to the value it carries whenever you introduce yourself, it presents various opportunities to project you as a potential candidate. But at the same time, as a student, it is extremely crucial to be “context-wise” these days. ‘Context-wise’ means being aware of the challenges our profession will pose in the future and having the foresight to be ready for it.

Skills – a futuristic approach

Let’s take the example of an MBA student aspiring to specialize in marketing. To be “context-wise,” he needs to have answers to the following questions:
1. How is marketing as a skill going to pan out in the next decade?
2. What sub-skills are relevant besides the degree?
3. How are organizations going to look at a marketing role and how different is that from the reality of what the degree is offering?
4. What demands will organizations have from a marketing person, in the future?
The answers to these questions are stepping stones to gathering context on one’s core skill. This helps in getting started on being environment-ready.
Skill Deprivation: Education Alone Won’t Guarantee A Job

The inevitable impact of technology

No matter what skills you have, you can’t ignore the potential impact of technology on your career. Technology is impacting every profession, including support functions such as HR, finance, administration, etc, which are all hugely affected. Not to mention the impact on client-facing roles and the overwhelming transformation within tech firms.

If a couple of certification courses will help you be more relevant in the industry, then those are the best skill investments today. Someone investing early in ‘social media marketing skills’ to stay future-ready is a good example of that.

Investing in behavioral readiness/development

As one starts climbing the career ladder, complexity increases. You have to manage the dynamics, build relationships, manage teams. All these things are going to be taxing for someone who is not behaviorally ready. If you think that you can pick up skills as you gain experience and go with the flow for large parts of your career, it would be an extremely risky way of looking at your career development.
You can also work towards achieving behavioral excellence in your field, just as you can invest in technical expertise. You just have to be very clear about the behavioral demands of the role that you soon intend to be in and work progressively towards mastering those.
Let’s call out a few predominant trends and data points relevant to skill development in the current scenario:

A growing economy with an array of opportunities in the professional world has increased the overall demand for skilled manpower.
The India Skills Report states that India needs 700 million skilled workers by 2022 to meet the demands of a growing economy.
Multiple new trends are disrupting the face of most industries as we know them, thereby increasing the need for an ever agile workforce.

The choices for learners today are absolutely clear: take a pragmatic look at your future area of work, along with your strengths and weaknesses, and ask yourself, what “context-related edge” can you give yourself?
The answers should be parallel and updated knowledge of upcoming technologies. It will help you to stay prepared for a certain behavioral or attitudinal adaptation. It will also help you navigate professional complexities in the future. The most pressing need for any student aspiring to be a professional, or learner who is already a working professional, is to be constantly skill-ready in a technology-enabled and disruptive world.
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Sweta Mishra

Blog Author

Sweta is Director HR at Indus Valley Partners. She has overall 14+ years of varied HR experience in industries across consulting, banking, finance, IT and ITES. She heads the entire gamut of HR activities for the organization across locations. She is certified on DISC profiling and NLP and has an experience of more than 8000 hours of facilitation. She designs and implement the people agenda with stakeholder buy in, ensuring focus on all HR domains and suitability of HR processes for business growth and employee satisfaction. Sweta holds a Master’s degree in English literature from Utkal University and has also done Master’s in applied psychology from Annamalai University.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What is meant by social skills?

Social skills are a vital component of our professional space. They are also known as interpersonal skills. Having the right social skills can help us maintain interpersonal relationships and also enable us to progress in our careers, achieve professional goals, build professional networks, and deal with different kinds of people. By social skills, we mean effective communication, which includes written, verbal and non-verbal communication, emotional intelligence, maintaining eye contact, body language, the neutrality of facial expressions and words while communicating with others, etc. Social skills help us conduct ourselves the right way, especially in professional spaces, like job interviews, team meetings, working with teams, client meetings, etc.

2. What skills are needed to be a sales manager?

Sales managers play a highly crucial role in an organisation because they have a direct impact on the revenue-generation activities of the company. Sales managers are directly involved with sales representatives and help them meet their sales quotas, forecast sales, run reports, and even engage in recruitment activities and mentor new joiners. They need to be able to develop and implement a sales strategy that is scalable and also analyse sales data. An efficient sales manager must be technically competent in handling CRM software and possess leadership skills to help his or her team achieve organisational sales objectives. At this post, one must be good at strategic planning, effective communication, collaboration, delegation, and motivation skills.

3. What are hard skills and soft skills?

Hard skills and soft skills are quintessential HR terms. Hard skills essentially mean job-related skills and knowledge that employees must possess to complete their job duties correctly. These are skills that are associated with employees who are efficient on paper. On the other hand, soft skills mean the personal attributes and qualities that enable employees to sustain themselves in the workplace. These are skills that help identify which employees are good as an individual. A successful candidate has the right balance of both soft and hard skills that help them thrive at work.

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