Have you ever been told you should learn programming? And data analytics? And leadership? And this and that. The list goes on.
We live in an unprecedented time. Learning new skills has never been easier. We can log on to our computers and learn from the best of the best. Often for free.
Yet this opportunity can be overwhelming. It may lead to paralysis about what you should learn. When we have so many choices, how do we prioritize? How do we create a learning plan that will get us where we want to go in our careers?
I recommend breaking this challenge down into three steps:
1: Create a long list of skills
We first need a list of candidates before we prioritize. Our choices can only be as good as those we consider in the first place. So our first step is creating a long list of potential skills we could learn in the future.
There are a few different factors you should consider:
Key skills that everyone should have. These are the ones that 95% of people should have to succeed in their careers. This includes leadership, emotional intelligence, persuasion, and communication (verbal and written).
Skills required for potential career endgames. You may be lucky enough to have an idea of where you want to end up professionally. If so, include the skills that you would need to be successful in this future role.
Skills required for your current job. Current opportunities are often points of leverage where we can pick up new skills quickly before moving to another opportunity. Succeeding in the now is therefore important in setting yourself up for future success. Include the skills that you need to succeed in your current job.
High value skills (whether directly relevant or not). The future usually surprises us. We never know when seemingly irrelevant skills may create value for us. It’s smart to develop a high value skill even if you don’t know how you’ll apply it. Three stand out: programming, data science, and marketing/sales.
2: Understand your current skill level in each skill.
This is key. You can’t know what you should develop if you don’t know what your level is in each ability. This is a fairly arbitrary exercise, and the parameters about how good you are will depend on your judgment. I recommend using at least three different levels. You can call them beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Maybe add a fourth level: master.
3: Prioritize.
Now that you have a long list and an idea of your skill level, you can begin prioritizing.
I recommend using two dimensions to do this: importance and timing. Importance is how crucial learning a skill is for you. Timing considers where you are in life right now and how you can best go about creating a sequential plan. Even if a skill is very important for you to develop, your circumstances may mean that you should save learning it for later down the line.
There are an array of factors that need to be considered within each dimension. Let’s go over some of these to set you in the right direction:
Importance:
Know if you are in a winner-take-all environment. This is the first thing you should know. Some career paths are all about mastery of one single skill. If you’re not a master of it, you won’t succeed. Most other paths, however, allow for interesting combinations of skills to set you apart. You need to know the specifics of your environment. Don’t waste your time with irrelevant skills if one or two dominate.
Prioritize your strengths. You should have an idea of what your strengths are - and you should develop them as much as possible. If success is a factor of both talent and effort, you want to create higher leverage for your effort by focusing on your strengths. Developing them is a near requirement for great success. Trust the process, even if the exact path to success is unclear right now.
Consider the minimum requirements for each skill. Some skills require a minimum level of competence no matter your area. These are usually the skills everyone should have (discussed above). If you’re below the threshold for some of these, you need to include them in your learning plan.
Consider how long-lasting the skill’s value is. Some abilities are likely to provide returns for you across your lifetime (storytelling) and others have a higher chance of being obsolete in a few years (an esoteric programming language). You usually want to prioritize the long-lasting ones so that the effects of learning can compound across your lifetime.
Timing:
What is easier to learn based on your current environment? Some things are easier to learn now. If your company has a lot of people very experienced in certain abilities, developing those abilities will be much easier. Your company or university course may also provide support in picking up new skills. Take note of what you could learn at an accelerated rate.
What will create professional leverage right now? Sometimes a certain skill will set us up nicely for the next step in our careers. An example of this is the early career emphasis on hard skills when getting hired, as well as the emphasis on soft skills to get promoted. Think about what will create the biggest opportunities for you in the near future and take it from there.
Only you can know how to balance all of these different factors. You should consider both the relative importance of the different skills as well as your time-specific circumstances. Some possibilities should stand out from the rest once you take all of this into account.
Next up is actually learning the prioritized skills, but that’s an article for another time…
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