Career stability used to depend on how many letters you had after your name denoting the degrees you’d earned, and being able to work your way up the ladder in one organization over many years. However, in today’s technology-driven environment with the half-life of skills shrinking across every industry, success is all about staying adaptable through continuous learning to develop new knowledge, skills and abilities.
Remaining indispensable in today’s job market means being flexible, curious and willing to build learning agility through mentorship, microlearning and AI-driven education. As the world moves from a job-based to a skills-based economy, it’s critical to evaluate the skills you can offer, suggests Annabelle Vultee, CEO of GoodHabitz, a learning and development (L&D) company that provides digital skills development solutions for organizations to bring back the joy of learning and build habits that stick.
“If you look at the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report from this February, you’ll see that 60% of employees, according to global CEOs, need to be upskilled or reskilled by 2030,” notes Vultee. That means the majority of workers are going to need a different skill set or new job in the next 5 years. “There will be a smaller handful of people who have all the skills that everyone wants who will get paid huge amounts of money,” explains Vultee.
How can you become that type of employee? Here we’ll explore how lifelong learning can give you an edge in your career and steps to help you upskill in this rapidly shifting economy.
Adaptability and lifelong learning are edging out tenure and credentials
While not a new concept, lifelong learning at work is the foundation of modern career stability. “In today’s workplace, the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn has become more valuable than years of experience,” says Vultee. “Employees who adapt easily to change and demonstrate openness to continuous learning are the ones who thrive.”
She equates this ability of continuously developing new skills to being more like a Swiss Army knife—being able to offer a multitude of skills and shift from one to another depending on your employer’s current priorities. This needs to happen rapidly to stay relevant, which means there’s no time to go back to school. “It used to be that your continuous learning was a master’s degree or a Ph.D., but that model is being disrupted,” says Vultee.
Lifelong learning is effective because it provides the skills and mindset to thrive as the world changes. It helps you stay relevant in your field, foster innovation and creativity, approach challenges with new perspectives, build a broader network and stay confident and motivated even if you have to pivot roles.
Top skills that will help you thrive in the workplace
There’s a list of 10 major skills that global CEOs are looking for, and almost every one of them is a human skill, says Vultee. For a long time, we haven’t focused on building soft skills in the same way that hard, more technical skills are acquired.
You don’t have to be a born leader or have a natural tendency to be adaptable. “You absolutely can get trained on these [soft skills],” notes Vultee. “With communication, creativity, [etc.] there are degrees and a subjectivity, but actually we’re getting more and more scientific about how good you are relative to the rest of the world and moving the needle on improving those skills.”
According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report, you’ll want to prioritize the following when pursuing professional skill development.
- Analytical thinking and innovation, even as automation and AI become more prominent
- Active learning and learning strategies to seek out and digest new information
- Creativity, originality, and initiative to translate imagination into action
- Technology design and programming
- Critical thinking and analysis
- Complex problem-solving to take multifaceted issues and break them down into digestible pieces
- Learning agility in leadership social influence to motivate and inspire others
- Emotional intelligence to look inward to gauge your self-perception
- Reasoning and problem-solving to address challenges
- Systems analysis and evaluation to understand operations and how they can be improved
Whether you are moving into a new decision-making role or figuring out how to utilize AI through effective prompting, there are a variety of educational strategies to explore ranging from formal learning, like professional certifications, to informal peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and mentorships, to self-directed education with apps.
A popular option right now is microlearning, also referred to as “bite-sized learning” or “activity-based learning.” Most people are busy and are squeezing in learning in quick spurts, says Vultee. “Anything that creates a habit needs to be… a simple trigger, so it’s usually the same time of day or the same sort of activity.” The best kind has an element of gamification that offers rewards so users can create a habit. The worldwide benchmark is Duolingo, says Vultee. Her company recently piloted an app for AI learning based on the design of Duolingo.
Here are other ways to develop new competencies that you can initiate on your own or request from your employer:
- Online courses through platforms like Masterclass, Coursera, edX, and LinkedIn Learning
- Mentoring programs
- Internal workshops led by subject matter experts
- Job rotation and cross-training at your current organization
- Leadership development tracks to prepare for a future role
- Technical certifications to demonstrate proficiency in a specific area
- AI-powered learning platforms that deliver personalized, on-demand training based on analyzing your needs and progress
Building a personal learning system
If you are ready to upskill to stay relevant using AI platforms, habit loops and skill audits, you’ll want to approach your continuous learning with these five steps in mind.
- Identify skill gaps so you know where to focus your continuous learning.
- Determine how you best learn, since everyone learns differently.
- Define clear, measurable learning goals that align with your current job or future prospects.
- Tap into technology to help track learning programs.
- Measure success—this can now be done using AI. “By identifying patterns humans miss and personalizing learning journeys, AI enables organizations to predict performance, close skills gaps proactively, and measure soft skills impact through objective business outcomes,” says Vultee.
If you’re concerned about staying valuable at work, it may be time to learn some new skills, especially those related to engaging with both AI and humans.
Photo by Inside Creative House/Shutterstock
