We live in a fast-paced world. New areas of competence emerge, while old once stop existing. As a student, you’d want to be prepared for the new requirements your future career may have.
Here are seven skills and traits you might need in your future career to reach your full potential.
- Critical thinking and problem solving
Whether it’s school, college or university, academic paper writing or discussion groups, they mostly teach you how to answer questions and rarely – how to ask them. Ability to ask questions is the basis of critical thinking. To solve a problem, you must critically analyze it and understand what caused it. This is why critical thinking and problem solving are interrelated.
Today, working process is organized differently than it was a few years ago. Instead of people with niche specializations working on tasks according to their area of competence there are diversified teams working on specific tasks. No managers have all the solutions and answers – it’s you who will need to work to find them.
Critical thinking and problem solving ability combined create a necessary basis for innovative solutions. You have to question the existing status quo and to critically evaluate it before offering alternative solutions and implementing new ideas.
- Network cooperation and leadership by persuasion
One of the biggest trends today is increase in temporary workforce numbers. It’s expected that in the nearest 4 or 5 years part-time and distance workers will constitute 40% of the general number of an average company employees. Additionally, the number of employees working in a ‘cloud’ environment will increase as well (global corporations have their offices all around the world).
Modern technology allows people to work and cooperate disregarding geographical borders, which is amazing when you come to think of it. That’s why modern employees must be ready for interaction via digital networks, as well as cooperation with very different people.
In this context, leadership is less related to hierarchy and much more to influence and persuasion. People introduce changes by trying to influence different social groups and then create teams to achieve a common goal. This may not sound totally unfamiliar, as working on research writing often involves teamwork.
- Flexibility and ability to adapt
The world around us is unstable, undefined, complex and intricate. This is why you need to learn how to adapt and re-purpose your strategies.
In post-industrial era, influence of technologies means that we must be flexible and able to adapt to unforeseeable consequences of revolutionary breakthroughs. It’s quite possible that you have to master new skills and new ways of thinking once in a while and get rid of those that became obsolete. For example, if you consider a professional writing career for example at customwritingbee.com , you will need to work on new writing strategies again and again.
- Initiative and enterprise
Traditionally, initiative used to be something that students demonstrated in defiance of their school activities or in addition to it. Most students develop these skills – initiative and enterprise – outside their academic life. As a rule, academic curriculums are focused on short-term tests and knowledge and aren’t really designed for creativity and innovative thinking. This leads to situations when business leaders struggle to find employees who constantly search for new opportunities, ideas and improvement strategies.
- Effective verbal and written communication
Recent research shows that most employers think that college and university graduates have insufficient communicative and social skills.
But consistent communication is not only about correct use of language and grammar; in many ways, it’s extension of logical thinking. Are you able to express your arguments in a convincing way? Can you infect your audience with your passion? Can you concisely summarize everything you want to say? Are you able to promote yourself or your product?
Communication is one of the most important traits for a leader. You can learn to use it when necessary in order to open a whole new vista of opportunities.
- Information assessment and analysis
As access to information becomes increasingly easy, accessibility of disinformation grows as well. Very few students have skills to assess the sources and content of information they use. Besides, information is constantly developing because humankind updates its knowledge base faster than ever.
In the fake news era active and well-informed people must critically assess all information they receive from various sources.
- Curiosity and imagination
Curiosity is a powerful engine for new knowledge and innovation. Inspired by that feeling of awe we experienced looking at the world around us when we were children, we can imagine something even better. One has to have powerful imagination to picture certain breakthroughs and them make them reality. Maybe that’s exactly why Albert Einstein once said that imagination is more important than knowledge. Being a student, you must focus on feeding your curiosity and thinking out of the box no less than on your informative writing.
Apart from preparing effective workers, it’s necessary to train prominent leaders and innovators. This will not only change the future of education, but the entire world we live in.
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