Career chats: Essential skills for any career
About this video
Several professionals name the skills they think matter in any career. They highlight being a decent, respectful human being, communication and listening, strategic thinking, organisation, collaboration, curiosity, and keeping a level head to think critically under stress.
You'll be able to
- name essential skills that professionals say matter in any career.
- explain what strategic thinking and critical thinking under pressure involve.
- identify which essential skills I already have and which I want to build.
Key words
- communication
- Sharing and understanding information well, including listening.
- strategic thinking
- Breaking a problem into parts and planning how to tackle each one.
- collaboration
- Working with others towards a shared goal.
- curiosity
- A strong wish to learn and understand new things.
- critical thinking
- Thinking carefully about a situation and its possible outcomes before acting.
Transcript
(upbeat music) - First thing is how to be a decent human being, right? As long as you have that communication, that respectful manner, everything else could be learned, right?
- Communication skills, start at 100% percent. Listen, as I say, you got two ears, one mouth. So really, really good listeners, and some of that is what people are saying or writing, but also body image, you know, with...
- The first is strategic thinking, and this is really how do you take a problem? How do you break it down into component parts? And then how do you start to tackle those component parts?
- The organization, you need to actually have a plan and be able to stick with it on the ground and have something that you can go back to when stuff starts going wrong, 'cause stuff, nobody ever shows up and has everything go be exactly way they want, right? So organization, step one.
Step two, in terms of collaboration, you need to be able to pitch your project to other people and find support sometimes.
- The number one skill for software engineering, which I've, I've personally experienced and heard a lot of people talk about is having a lot of curiosity. There is so much at you that comes from all angles of new technologies, new problems, and it's always changing.
And so having that curiosity for whatever you're working on, what's ever in front of you is really important.
- Collaboration. I was not a big fan of group work in college, not gonna lie, but here I am and it's unavoidable. So that's something that I tell a lot of young people that are gonna leave college and enter the workforce, I'm like, get used to it. Group work never goes away.
So find something about it you like and show up and be present.
- Being able to have a level head and to kind of like critically think about certain situations, 'cause you're gonna be put in these stressful situations and in those moments you gotta take ego out of the, out of the equation and really start to look at it from almost like that 30,000 foot view and see like, okay, if I do this, then this happens.
If I do this, then this happens. (upbeat music)
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