You may be close to finishing school and still struggling to know what you want to do after you’ve finished. The pressure is mounting and everyone you meet or bump into at the shops endearingly wants to know what you’ll be studying next year. But how can you know what you should study if you are barely able to know what you want to do ‘for the rest of your life’. The good news is that the skills required for jobs of the future are less dependent on the hard skills but more and more have the soft skills element. And with the accessibility to learning opportunities outside of the traditional university degrees makes it a lot easier to continue learning after having left school and once you’ve spent a few years working.
Diplomas and certificates
If you want to get a format qualification but are not sure what this should be, it is good to go with something that is general yet is valuable and applicable in so many situations. Ideas of such qualifications are doing a diploma in business or a diploma in leadership and management online. A diploma in business administration is also a good option and you can go on to do your MBA. Having a recognized and credible certificate associated with you and your resume is a great addition and asset that will stand you in good stead. After this, you can diversify into short courses that add specific skills for a specific purpose because you have the foundation in place.
This means emotional
With the skills of the future being less around hard skills and more to do with soft skills, you need to find ways to sharpen and enhance these particular skills. It is a lot to do with your primary and high school learning, but there are ways to develop in these areas even as an adult. The skills that were identified at the World Economic Forum were critical thinking, emotional intelligence, complex problem solving, creativity, people management, coordinating with others, judgment and decision making, service orientation, negotiation, and cognitive flexibility. Look for short courses online that help develop these skills, they aren’t necessarily skills that you need to get formal qualifications for, but really just something that needs to find a way to be adopted and grounded in the way you conduct yourself in the workplace.
Keeping the hard skills
Sometimes, regardless of all the hype about the soft skills that were listed above, there is still the need to have a tangible skill. The soft skills must accompany this hard skill, but either way, you need to have a useful skill to offer. The hard skill is one that should be accompanied by a formal qualification so that it is recognized in any company and is known to be consistent and reliable. Examples of hard skills can be analytical jobs, such as accounting, monitoring, and evaluation, it can be practical, like plumbing, bricklaying or electrical, it can be IT related such as programming or computer design business.
