TWIC Special Edition: On World Youth Skills Day, I want to find you the "must-have" skill to win the workplace

Welcome to the latest installment of This Week In China, a bi-weekly newsletter talking about the hottest buzz in the workplace, and business mainly comes from China, one of the most dynamic and fast-evolving economies. We will talk about the future of work and the future of business alongside the most note-worthy anecdotes from the Chinese community. Please subscribe to the newsletter so you won't miss out!

Today (July 15) is World Youth Skills Day, a day recognized by the United Nations to highlight the strategic importance of providing youth with skills for employment, decent work, and entrepreneurship. With the post-epidemic economy full of uncertainties and accelerating digital transformation, the workforce is facing an increasingly urgent need to up-skill. However, many working people are often at a loss as to where to start and what skills can help them in the future workplace climbing path.

With the aim of helping people to see the future of their careers (as well as rubbing it in), I interviewed my friends on LinkedIn, both in China and abroad, in the shortest possible time to get their opinions and insights on the #skillupforthefuture.

Digital, digital, and digital

Yes, the digital skills you have heard me (or various workplace gurus, industry gurus, HR gurus) talk about countless times and heard calluses, including but not limited to programming, algorithms, IT, architecture, digital marketing, digital content ...... and other "Internet native skills".

Joanne Liang, working in the finance industry, told me right at the beginning of my interview that digital skills are now the most important in her industry. "Technology is evolving rapidly, and the changes will be even faster in the future. The future workforce should stay curious and develop the ability to learn new knowledge and skills with agility and adapt quickly to new environments". Frank Liu, an HR professional in the retail industry, elevated digital skills to the level of a "must-have for the future": "I would recommend everyone to learn digital marketing. Because the development of the social and the economy is more and more indispensable to the digital multimedia platform, and the development of all industries is reflected in marketing, so learning digital marketing is a big trend." And he himself is practicing this view, "The skill I am most interested in learning right now is digital marketing."

Our old friend Joyce Zhang, Head of Human Resources with LinkedIn China, repeatedly stressed the importance of digital native skills in the interview. "In my opinion, the whole workplace is talking about digital native careers as well as native skills, including programming languages, algorithms, deep learning, artificial intelligence, and all kinds of existing hot digital-based skills. I have a lot of HR friends and we all have this experience that industries like automotive, real estate, and healthcare, which used to seem like traditional industries, are now going for digital transformation."

She emphasized, "When we talk about future-oriented skills, the underlying foundations of these digital skills are actually the same. The talent skills native to the Internet are just as much in demand in industries that are much older and have a much deeper industrial base built up. So I think in terms of hard skills, these digital-native skills are the skills that society will still be in short of supply in the next 10 to 20 years."

Digitalization with a good basic skillset

So, whether you are a rookie or an experienced careerist, if you spend money to learn Python and data analysis skills, will you be able to get a promotion and a pay rise and reach the top of your life eventually?

Not necessarily.

In the eyes of many of the LinkedIn Top Voices I talked to, digital skills are certainly the hottest and most sought-after nowadays, but just as the relationship between the Internet and traditional industries should be "mutual achievement and mutual promotion", rather than "either one or the other", traditional industry skills and the digital skills of the Internet era do not present a zero-sum relationship. "Many emerging skills are born in the face of the Internet era and future technology, but these skills do not squeeze those vertical areas of expertise, the two are not a relationship between one and the other. And some very specialized industries, such as aerospace, precision instruments, machinery, chip manufacturing, etc., have not changed the requirements for basic skills of talents because of digitalization. The demand for core skills and knowledge in these hard-core technologies is rigid." Joyce noted.

She especially emphasized that the most advanced technology talents in her eyes must be a combination of "hard and soft" talents. "When we talk about the digital transformation of the industries and digital talent, this type of talent is different from the digital talent native to the Internet. In addition to basic knowledge, their knowledge of the industry, as well as the accumulation of core techniques and knowledge is a composite intertwined process, which is slowly accumulated through the work."

This type of talent can connect industry and the Internet or the Internet of Things, which is rarer than pure Internet talent, and very difficult to find. Because it crosses industries, there are only a handful of such talents that can be found nationwide." For example, cutting-edge skills such as industrial 5G, digital production lines, digital machine tools, and chip design and manufacturing cannot be cultivated by a decade of explosive development in the Internet industry.

So, while all the job seekers are keen on the high salary and high development of the Internet industry, they might as well go back and see if there are opportunities for industry + digitalization in their own industry. As I discussed in the previous installment of TWIC, the Internet industry has entered the second half of the game, and the era of rapid growth and monetization by piling up time and manpower is over. It's time to return to common sense, to get back on the ground, and to find growth points in refined industry operations, including opportunities for personal workplace development.

If hard skills don't work, try soft skills

Hard skills require a lot of time and resources to learn, and so do soft skills. And, in the opinion of various experts on LinkedIn, soft skills are no less important than hard skills in future career development.

As a professional career coach, Yuki Wang said in her reply to me that she thinks the skills that deserve more attention in the future are soft skills.

There is no denying that any hard skills or certificates are indeed the door to the workplace, but if you want to go higher and further in the workplace, you may need soft skills more. But often soft skills, such as communication skills, decision-making skills, stress tolerance, teamwork skills, etc., are easily overlooked before entering the workplace. This may be because compared to hard skills, soft skills are really difficult to quantify or standardize. Soft skills + hard skills are the most in-demand talent in all industries in the future.

So, what are the soft skills that every working person should invest time in learning and practicing? Under the topic of #skillupforthefuture curated by LinkedIn News, members from China and abroad gave their suggestions for young professionals around the world.

• Yuki Wang: I would probably choose "Mental Strength". After all, we face all kinds of stress and frustration in the workplace and life, and one of the keys to dealing with it is how we can analyze our environment more objectively, recover our emotions, and make more appropriate decisions.
• Bingbing Bai (Director of Product, Top Voice in China): Deep customer insight and innovative thinking skills. If people in the workplace have the ability to combine customer insight, organizational structure, and technical implementation, they will be unbeatable in the job market. In addition, as the Internet deepens, there are no barriers to talent and professional information, and organizations will become more open and flexible, so synergy will become a determining factor in organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Synergy includes organizational capabilities such as structure, distribution, self-motivation, and flexibility, and it is actually "universal communication capability" when it comes to individuals.
• Eric Sim (Top Voice in both China and Singapore, adjunct professor): the capability to socialize online and offline. When my lectures are moved to online, my students miss out on the physical networking aspects because when I taught in person, I would often bring along 4 to 6 seasoned practitioners for the students to network with. My online network has helped shape my thinking and made me a better person,
• Juliana Chen (Top Voice Singapore, publisher, CEO of media company): Young professionals should learn life skills that are not taught in school, including adulting (paying bills and taxes, reading financial statements, budgeting, get a job, plan for a career of 30+ years, invest money), mental health (emotional resilience, manage stress, respond in a sudden crisis, overcome long-term chronic adversity), communication (negotiate, verbalize complex emotion, effectively share feedback, lead a team, write plainly and clearly, teach others), entrepreneurship (innovate, be creative, raise funds, commercialize an invention, present or pitch on stage or in public), media literacy & logic (to think logically, consume news meaningfully, identify fake news and misinformation, read between the lines, vote wisely), and social consciousness (be "woke" about a larger cause, care about other people and the environment, participate in social causes, find purpose in life)

The Overlooked Universal Skill: Writing

Another longtime friend of LinkedIn, Glenn Leibowitz, McKinsey Communications Leader in Greater China, contributed an article to share what he sees as one of the most important skills for the future workforce: writing.

No matter how much technology helps us do our jobs better, we still rely heavily on written communication to get things done. Whether it’s an email to your boss asking for budget to fund your project, a sales pitch to a potential client, a business plan for that venture-funded unicorn you plan to launch, or a blog post on LinkedIn or Substack, knowing how to write well is an essential skill and one that will pay a perpetual stream of career-enhancing dividends once you’ve invested in developing it.

Another LinkedIn Top Voices Allen Zhang has also emphasized the important role of writing for workplace competitiveness in several articles, "Writing is an important opinion output ability, and people who can write will only get wider and wider in the workplace."

Glenn shared five tips for improving your writing skills:

• Read books about the craft, especially ?On Writing Well, by William Zinsser, and?On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King. Both books have become bestselling classics.
• Read great?writing, both fiction and non-fiction.
• Listen to podcasts. They’re free, portable “classrooms in your ear”, where you can find practical advice from successful practitioners of the craft.
• Take an online course. LinkedIn Learning has some good programs if you are a premium subscriber, or check out?Write With Impact Academy, Glenn's new learning community for aspiring writers.
• Write! All the pros know the best way to learn to write well is to write. It’s a mental muscle you need to build like any other, and one that requires consistency and discipline.?One of the best ways to cultivate a writing habit is by blogging, something you can do easily for free on LinkedIn, Medium, or Substack.

Allen has also shared his workplace writing skills on LinkedIn, and here are a few summarized tips.

• Keep in mind the purpose of workplace writing: to convey value and perspective, to move events forward, and ultimately to improve productivity.
• Be concise to managers: the boss controls the direction, and you have to outline. When writing to your superiors, focus on problems, causes, methods, revelations. Less to speak of phenomena, common sense, stories, reasoning.
• Be detailed to employees: the role of subordinates is to take in and execute. This is when your text should be extremely instructive, even as detailed as a product manual, when the other party has no doubts, rest assured that the implementation.
• Two methods to refine skills: repeated imitation and diligent practice. If you don't have the energy to study, taking writing classes is a good option. Observe the writing style, expression skills, text rhetorical techniques of excellent writers, and then constantly practice, compare and modify. Over time, you will be able to find your own writing style.
• Three final reminders: adapt to the context, build up a thesaurus, and restrain your emotions.

Comprendi?

I would like to conclude my special report on World Youth Skills Day with a message from Kristine de Guzman, a career and life coach.

Skilling up for the future is not about finding that one skill that will turn us into a marketable employee or a successful entrepreneur. It is not the elixir that will make you a hero. It is you and your ability to find that elixir through different stages and seasons of life that makes you a hero.Nourish the superpower within you - your gifts and talents. Remain curious and humble to learn. Be ready to try, to fail and to keep trying. Be agile in your learning, your leadership and your life.You have it in you.

In it together!

What else do you want to say about overtime and liberty to choose? Feel free to comment. The newsletter is still in the process of improvement. Feel free to send me a private message about a topic you care about, and maybe it will be the topic of the next #TWIC.

See you next time!

Special thanks to Joanne Liang，Frank Liu，Joyce Zhang，Yuki Wang，Bingbing Bai，Eric Sim，Juliana Chen，Glenn Leibowitz, Allen Zhang, and Kristine de Guzman, for all your contribution to the report.