Skill Building Series: Skills That Pay The Bills: Building A Successful Career

You may be hearing a lot of buzz around employers who are interested in universal hard skills and soft skills in the career circuit these days. It is no secret that possessing the right skills for the job will give you the proverbial ‘leg up’ against your jobseeker competition. What’s more, possessing universal hard and soft skills will enhance your ability to remain flexible with your career. What does this mean? When you have career flexibility, you can decide to shape your career around what interests you based on the skills that you have built. Hard and soft skills that can apply to many industries are key to fueling career flexibility. Let’s dig in to uncover some of the universal hard skills you can learn in 2023:

Account Management and Project Management - Maintain accounts and manage projects from inception to completion. Most every company is in business to serve a customer that needs their services. Account management allows business leaders the ability to cultivate customer relationships by anticipating their needs, establishing timely follow-up with their customers, and ensuring the products or services they are selling will serve the customer efficiently and effectively. Account management for companies is very important when establishing authority in an industry while simultaneously creating value and revenue for all stakeholders, customers, and employees.

Whether you realize it or not you have either managed projects in the past or may have been part of a project team. Project management is required anytime there is an action plan in place to create a new process, product, or service. Project managers rely on various internal and external teams to have a successful project completion.

While there are many careers that rely on account management and project management skills, having experience in applications such as Asana, Salesforce, and HubSpot can truly put you ahead of the competition. Industries that rely on the universal skills of account and project management experience range from healthcare to business and construction.

User Experience – Designing the view of the user. Another emerging hard skill to consider is User Experience (UE). If you are not too sure what UE is, let’s get you caught up to speed. User Experience professionals are responsible for designing the look and feel of online programs and databases from an end-user point of view. A User Experience professional is responsible for a number of online elements; for example, the color scheme, how users experience websites, the process of completing an online form, online payment options within a website, what a user sees when they set up a social media account, etc. Possessing this sought-after hard skill can serve you well in today’s job market.

Patient Care - If you envision a future taking care of patients in any capacity, having the hard skills needed to care for patients is critical. According to the Health and Human Rights Resource Guide, Patient care skills include: the prevention, treatment, and management of illness and the preservation of physical and mental well-being through services offered by health care professionals. There are many patient care related careers available that are in-demand and have shorter training requirements such as medical billing and coding.

Bookkeeping – Providing businesses with insights into the financial health of their companies is what bookkeepers are most known to do. However, consider this, the hard skills that you learn in bookkeeping will serve you well in other roles as your career progresses. Bookkeeping helps you hone in on basic finance and accounting skills that can be easily transferable as you move on to leadership or even running your own business! Now, Let’s dig in to uncover some of the universal soft skills you should learn in 2023:

According to Resume-now.com, soft skills are the personal attributes and qualities that have an impact on how you interact with others within your team, community as well as with friends, family and acquaintances. It is often said that soft skills are hard to teach because they are innate behaviors that are often seen as an extension of your personality. So you may wonder “what can I do to improve my soft skills?” There are certainly some actions you can take to help with soft skills starting with communication and empathy.

Communication and Empathy – communication and empathy are your connections to the world on paper, with your voice, your body language, and your facial expressions. Communication is such an important soft skill to improve over the course of your career. Possessing the ability to provide updates on work happening within your organization, communicate issues before they become major problems and showing empathy when appropriate are all forms of communication. Many hiring managers have expressed their interest in finding candidates that have great communication skills and often, candidates can be passed over for job opportunities or promotions if they focus squarely on demonstrating their technical knowledge; however, exhibiting a lack of effective communication skills.

Adaptability – can you adapt to constant changes happening in the world of work? Being adaptable is a highly desired soft skill that employers need in their workforces. As companies embrace how markets shift and change, employees who are willing to adapt to new ideas are valuable. Remaining open-minded and willing to try new techniques will almost certainly impress any hiring manager who is looking for candidates with that soft skill.

Organization – organization is where efficiency meets effectiveness. Who knew that being organized could lead to a great career? It is not just your parents who want you to be organized. Candidates that show organizational skills are much more likely to be recruited for competitive job opportunities. Why do organizational skills matter? Candidates who have good organizational skills tend to be efficient with their time, can contribute to the team at a higher level and may be able to work on many different projects varying in complexity and deadlines.

 Hard and soft skills that pay the bills can be learned and should be used as part of your summer strategy to help you snag a lifetime of career opportunities.