6 In-Demand Skills Your Employees Need Today

The year 2020 is highlighted by strange and sometimes even bizarre twists happening on the global scale with the COVID-19 pandemic, political, and economic struggle. All this crazy stuff brought lots of unexpected changes to many peoples’ careers.  Because many people lost their jobs, the amount of stress feeds the frustration and leads to aggressive outbursts. All this definitely is not helping to find a new place for employment.

Any info about how to get valuable skills today is most in-demand and sought for by many. Statistics show that such areas as machine programming, computer-aided design, manufacturing, exotic materials fabrication still offer jobs and need specialists. Specialized training in biological research appears to be a specialty with quite a bright future. Radiologists have good salaries and are getting paid extremely well, so do orthopedists. Career markets still need engineers, artists, musicians, professional athletes, and psychologists for providing assistance to people helping them to adapt and resolve issues.

Are there any skills that require some training without the need for swinging to entirely unknown professional areas? But before going into new careers, the first thing that lots of us need to do is to become open to what is happening to embrace the changes, and try to adjust. At the same time, you have to reflect on the past in order to learn its lessons. If you quit stressing out and move on, it can turn your life into a wonderful adventure. And you can turn into someone who can merge into a brighter future with no fears.

A flexible frame of mind allows us to transition to further professional endeavors. Becoming adaptable creates the right attitude of responsibility for our own experiences and actions. By practicing and improving discipline you will hone the skill of adaptation and flexibility. These personal qualities really do create a higher quality of life and a sense of excitement, adventure, and creativity in everyday living. And opportunities abound for those who are open to them.

Read this blog post and find out what the most demanded soft and hard skills are out there sought by the job market. Take a walk through this info we’ve found for you and make notes.

Why employees need soft skills training

Currently, the workforce faces the challenge where people need to invest money and effort into soft skills training. Suppose, a candidate has extraordinary technical skills in various computer-related activities but, unfortunately, he does not possess crucial soft skills like effective communication, team spirit, goal setting, or positive thinking. How will he be able to demonstrate his talents to his prospective employers? Or to prove his usefulness to his customers once he is selected for the job later on?

Soft skills are desirable qualities required for anybody to be selected, to retain the job he/she applied for. Then to manage yourself while working in the professional environment. They do not depend on acquired knowledge that is usually doled out in colleges and universities, but the ability to deal with people, have a positive and flexible attitude. Soft skills basically are all about the way you communicate, establish rapport, perform in teamwork, and how you carry yourself before teammates.

Since soft skills tightly relate to interpersonal qualities, they contribute to professional skills as well as boosting career credentials. Simply put, while your tech skills can be termed as hard skills, your soft skills are complementing the hard skills that you acquired. Technical skills can accomplish a specific task, while soft skills provide assistance for accomplishing the same professional goal in a much better way with good team spirit, effective networking, and proper communication.

How can soft skills be improved? 

Here is how you can utilize the opportunities in your work environment effectively:

• Be focused on improving your communication skills. This means – think before you speak or interact with others. Always ensure you are able to convey the right message to the right crowd in the right manner. Of course, it comes out of practice.
• Be a very good listener. Allow people to express what they feel. In a team, this quality would make people approach you with their candid opinions.
• Adapt yourself to any kind of situation and try to come out of preconceived notions. Change is the need of the hour.
• Handle changes with your emotional intelligence. Keep it flexible enough to work in various situations. This may refer to change in place, work environment, team, language, etc.
• Try to examine yourself and analyze the feelings and motivations in situations. Analyze people’s feelings and motivations. Try to perceive the motivational factors of others to get a complete grasp of the situation.
• Practice conversing professionally, encouraging others, providing constructive responses, and positive attitude towards others.
• Come out of your comfort zone and embrace change.

Now, it is definitely up to you what kind of soft skills you want to learn or improve. You may wish to learn communication, business writing skills, interpersonal skills, relationship building, networking, cognitive skills, negotiation skills, etc. If you are into sales, then improve your selling skills, as well as convincing skills. This may also include interaction and analytical skills, improvement of which would be beneficial to you.

Since soft skills are a huge bucket that comes immediately after we are equipped with our hard skills, no matter academic, certifications, or licenses. Quite a few soft skills are also learned along with general education (in the US). This includes peer pressure and anger management, which teenagers learn during high school. There are learning of such soft skills like Interview skills and Group Discussions (GD) skills offered during university studies on campus.

But most importantly, you’re the one who decides which soft skills you specifically need the most for career improvement. Before you make up your mind, do a proper analysis, and evaluate your behavior, experience, habits, and many other things which relate to the professional attitude you showcase. After you’re done with analysis, determine exactly what kind of soft skills development is needed to fulfill in order to succeed.

What technology skills do employees need

No doubt, good technical skills can open any door to a successful career and good salaries. Having excellent tech skills along with good soft skills (or, so-called, “people skills”) is what will ensure you stay within the organization for a long time and be valued as a professional. In the current corporate world, just having a professional education is nearly pointless. This not as helpful for a good career if you don’t put it across to someone in an efficient manner. Since many tech professionals have to work under a lot of pressure sometimes, the ability to work under pressure with a positive attitude is the need of every organization. The pressure of completing a task within the deadline, the pressure of reaching the top, the pressure of generating revenue, and so on.

Okay, let’s say you’ve worked hard on boosting soft skills. Now is the time to point at the most valued tech skills most employers need in 2020.

Tech skills are substantial because the majority of today’s transactions are made on different technological platforms. As much as soft skills are important, tech skills are now the skills employers and businesses are looking for. This is because of the constantly growing need for proper maintenance and accessibility of different necessary devices used almost in every area of business or industries now.

Now, let’s outline the most common areas where tech skills are needed:

• Operating systems. Proficiency with common software and graphical user interface or command-line interface conventions.
• Software design. When it comes down to the software side, here comes the coding part that fundamentally involves learning the basic languages to talk and command the machine. The programming languages are C, CPP, Python, or Java, and many more at coding blocks you can get both online and offline courses for most of the programming language skills.
• Programming. Specific programming paradigms and languages. There are also such important things that require tech skills and sufficient tech knowledge like efficient algorithms, maintainable code, extensible code, etc.
• IT skills. Network design and implementation, securing a network and computer systems, running a VPN, running a private DNS server, and so on.
• Development of network software. Navigating and communicating over the Internet through various protocols to achieve specific tasks.  
• Hardware. Anything from soldering components to building a computer to designing custom computer chips or circuits. General electrical knowledge. Robotics. Low-level programming languages and assembly.

A good number of numerous paths can be taken in the IT field. Many of them usually lead to well-above-average salaries, which make the tech field one of the most desirable ones to enter. However, in order to get to a high paying position, you will need to specialize and get lots of hands-on practice. Just a few of these specialties are: DevOps, software engineering, hardware engineering, project management, security, network engineering, product management, and there are lots more. Another good thing is that many technology jobs often pay senior technicians just as much (or sometimes even more) as to managers.

For the most part, once you decide to pursue a tech career, it largely depends on the amount of work you’re willing to put into it. You can earn up to 90k for a starter salary from such monster corporations like Google/Facebook/Amazon as a software engineer or developer, if you have a high GPA, plenty of projects completed, and successfully opt through their interview process. But usually, a more reasonable starting salary would be around 55-65k in most states for the US. Simply having a few years of professional programming experience under your belt can raise your worth significantly. Most careers in technology can gross a high pay if you’re willing to put the work in.

In-demand skills employers need from professionals

#1.Programming. Very few skills are as widely needed, lucrative, and versatile as programming. Not only does it make you highly marketable to employers, but it can also unlock the ability to make a supplemental income for yourself (freelance, entrepreneurship, etc). As prevalent as the use of dynamic sites, apps, data analytics platforms, and many other tools. The truth is that few people understand how they work, except programmers.

According to an article on TechRepublic, the 10 highest-paid programming skills are:

• Golang
• Perl
• Shell
• Node.js
• Java/J2EE
• TypeScript
• Python
• Ruby
• Swift
• C#

#2.Digital marketing. This is one of the most desired career options one can go for as every business wants to show their presence online, so as to generate traffic on the website. The sole reason for the popularity is the increasing online presence of a business. Youth are widely inclined to this field. This will tell the individuals about the product and will fetch sales to them.

#3.Data analysts. According to the 2020 statistics, data analysts will become increasingly more important in all industries. Survey respondents said they expect to have a greater demand for data analysts because they will need help making sense of all of the data generated by technological disruptions.

#4.Biomedical Engineers. The aging of the population and a growing focus on health issues will drive demand for better medical devices and equipment designed by biomedical engineers.

#5.Blockchain technology. Developers in blockchain technology are gaining popularity day by day becoming the most flourishing skill in IT and Internet technologies jobs. The reason blockchain technology is considered such a big deal is that it’s associated with cryptocurrencies and tokenized solutions. Tokenization is the process of splitting up units of value into ever smaller units so that more people can potentially buy smaller units than would otherwise be possible. This takes the existing communication on the Internet and adds on the Internet of money and value transactions.

#6.Artificial Intelligence specialists. To get a job in AI technologies usually require a Bachelor of Science degree or qualification in computer science or IT engineering. But also such skills and experience with programming languages like  JavaScript, Python, C, SQL, etc. Good skills and knowledge in AI sought for by such industries like customer service,  retail, manufacturing, agriculture, business & finances, transportation, etc.

Conclusion

Since hard and soft skills always require improvement and updates, online courses that teach those skills seem like the best aid you can get. If you’re looking for some useful and up-to-date information regarding tech skills, check out the latest online courses on the Grinfer eLearning platform! Go to Grinfer’s blog where you can review the list of new online courses just arrived which were created by IT pros, business professionals, and experienced coaches. Or view our homepage for more information and even more awesome courses.