Developing a variety of transferable skills enables you to adapt to change in a rapidly evolving business world. When you commit to lifelong learning, you continually evolve in your capabilities, interests, and passions. By learning new skills, you improve your ability to quickly assimilate knowledge, and new opportunities to use these skills continually arise.
Being in demand enables you to choose the work you do and to follow your passions. If that’s your ultimate destination, transferable skill sets will help you navigate there. Regardless of your current field, developing and refining these skills will help you to find new opportunities in a variety of industries, even while others struggle through economic cycles.
Language
According to the Daily Texan newspaper, the United States is largely monolingual. Foreign language education is failing; only 15-20 percent of Americans can speak another language fluently. With a growing influx of foreign workers in an already globalized business environment, there is an increasing need for bilingual workers who can work on multicultural and multinational teams. Knowledge of multiple languages is also perceived by many employers as a sign of high intelligence.
The most in-demand languages for your career, according to Kiplinger, are
1. Mandarin Chinese (848 million native speakers)
2. German (78 million native speakers)
3. Portuguese (203 million native speakers)
4. Japanese (128 million native speakers)
5. Spanish (399 million native speakers)
Interpersonal
Employers hire people with people skills. Today’s collaborative work environments demand interpersonal skills more than ever. As teams become more cross-cultural and diverse, the interpersonal skills required to work effectively with people from different backgrounds are important assets. All of these skills are rooted in a genuine interest in and empathy for other people:
- Listening: How we communicate attentiveness and interpret what others are saying.
- Verbal Communication: The content and style of our oral communication.
- Non-Verbal Communication: How we communicate without words, including body language and facial expressions.
- Problem Solving: Identifying and defining specific problems, and collaborating to find the right solutions.
- Negotiation: Working together to find mutually agreeable solutions.
Project Management
Project management involves highly strategic thinking about the big picture. It’s about understanding the purpose of an undertaking and prioritizing a sequence of actionable steps to get it done. It’s about delegating responsibility, requiring accountability, and engaging the right people at the right times to see a project through to successful fruition. Project management is a core function in every industry. Especially if you’re detail oriented, it pays to develop this skill, which encompasses these capabilities:
- Leadership
- Communication
- Team Management
- Negotiation
- Risk Management
Clearly, communication is at the heart of language, interpersonal, and project management skill sets. In any language, through any channel, being effective—and ultimately successful—in your career begins with being understood.