Augmenting Hard and Soft Skills with Career Skills
How to teach employees to thrive in a changing world of work
This week, I had the chance to catch up with a handful of career and leadership development professionals spanning across higher education, corporate, and non-profit. These conversations are always interesting and thought provoking as it gives me a chance to understand what’s happening on the front lines in each of these respective fields, as well as spar over ideas that often make their way into my work or writing.
One question that came up in these conversations was around the topic of “career readiness.” The core premise of the discussion was around how despite the fact that business and markets have changed significantly over the past 20-30 years, the way we approach careers and individual career development has stayed the same.
As a result, students and professionals enter the workforce playing catch up on how to manage their careers. And managers and leaders, who grew up are either put in positions where they A) aren’t actually teaching or making space for their employees to learn these skills, or B) are teaching outdated models and insights around career development. This is problematic and frustrating for all sorts of reasons.
Even when we acknowledge there is a strategic or mindset shift by an organization and their approach to growth and development, the execution and the details are often misaligned.
For example, it’s now popular to say that “career ladders are dead,” or that at our company, “you can advance and develop in many ways.” But the processes, reward structures, and mechanisms for development, are often still built in the “career ladder” model.
During my conversations, we acknowledged that it would be hard to solve all of the structural challenges with this, but we did spend time thinking about the idea of career readiness, and what it would mean to prepare students with the right mindset, thoughts, and practices for navigating and architecting their careers before they enter the workforce, a profession, or go through a transition into a new field or function. It is table stakes today, that higher education and professional trades must give their professionals and students the right hard and soft skills to succeed in their role or profession for today.
But by focusing on career readiness, or focusing and teaching professionals a set of “career practices” or “career skills” would enable them to advance, pivot, grow, change as they navigate the complex and ever-changing world of work. It would allow for employees to think through how they could thrive in a company that did have a “career ladder” or one that had a lattice.
It would empower employees who wanted a portfolio approach, to find ways outside of their core day job to use their talents and skills. And it would give employees the ability to use professional networks and third places, to share ideas, make connections, and find new opportunities they could not get on their own.
Or, being able to teach professionals a set of “career skills,” which, in alignment with the specific soft and hard skills that someone might need, would allow an employee to navigate the complexities of the workplace, and the lack of strategic direction and resources that exist in the workplace.
What Could Career Readiness Look Like?
As we dug deeper into career readiness, we thought more deeply about what this would look like if it were a class - what are the topics we would teach, learning objectives we would cover, or core skills + practices that we would focus on? We developed a list, which, came from many of the core things we’ve noticed employees in our networks and orbit who are successful practice:
1)Intentional career planning and goal setting - Taking ownership of your career starts with thinking through your own personal aspirations for your career. Learning how to consistently make time to set career goals, communicate them with others, and work to achieve them never falls out of style.
2)Self-Awareness and Continuous Reflection - Being able to know yourself, your strengths and the things you enjoy and are good at helps you gain confidence and find more opportunities to use those strengths and incorporate those interests into your work. Finding time to consistently reflect and learn enables you to track your learning and growth, and think about other opportunities to pursue.
3)Documenting and Sharing Your Work + Deliverables - Hard work and good work is not enough, getting exposure by sharing your work with others, inside or outside of your organization opens you up to more projects, initiatives and more connections, which increases your surface area for opportunities.
4)Building Your Career Community - We all need a little help - Learning how to cultivate a team of advisors who can provide spot feedback and advice is critical to advancement. Furthermore, having 3rd places, where you can affiliate, confide in peers and get ideas provides outlets for connection and gives you ways and ideas for how to adapt and evolve.
5)Sensing and Responding To Market Opportunities - As great as it is to have a longer term career plan, it’s also important to be able to sense what’s going on right now and uncover emergent career opportunities based on what is happening right in front of you. Through paying attention and seizing the moment with experimentation and learning, you can fuel your own opportunities for growth.
6)Understanding Power and Influence Dynamics - Most people don’t have formal control or authority over decisions that impact them. Being able to both understand the power and influence dynamics (formal and informal) within your company can help you think about how to find ways to get what you need to advance your own goals. And knowing the different types of people and their roles (mentors, sponsors etc) and how to cultivate relationships is critical to getting support in those rooms that you cannot be in
7) Navigating Processes and Structures - Being able to understand your role and take ownership of the work you need to do in the performance management, evaluation, or feedback process is critical for any type of goal for advancement (e.g. promotions, new projects roles, etc) but it’s also critical for feeling and ensuring you are being compensated, rewarded and evaluated in an equitable and fair manner.
8)Finding Your Career Growth Mode - Careers are long, and what is important to us in work and in our lives changes over time. Knowing how you can approach the growth and development that you may want and desire in your life, and knowing how to go about achieving it can open you up to more creative and personalized ways of career growth, fit for your purpose in that moment.
While this is not an exhaustive list, I feel confident that if you can master these practices you can find ways to architect your career in a way that aligns to your own ambitions. Furthermore, finding ways to teach these practices to employees, especially those who are earlier in their career, or who are in industries that are in a constant state of change, or just in a company without clear career development resources can ensure they can fuel growth and development on their own.
I’d love to hear from you about which of these practices resonate, or what you think would be impactful to teach in a course or class on the topic of career readiness
Employees: Which of these practices has made a difference for you? Which of these was a hard practice to learn?
People Managers: Which of these do you think would help your employees feel confident about their direction of their careers
Career Educators: Which of these do you think your students would benefit from learning before they enter the workplace or workforce?
Talent and Learning Professionals: How do you educate and enable employees to build these practices into their career development plans? What resources are you providing, and what processes are in place that support these practices?