The Future of Work Capsules: Becoming a hybrid professional will put your skill in high demand.

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Baptista Sarah Gebu (Mrs.)

The whole essence of acquiring education and all the credentials is to enable you make ends meet and take care of yourself, family and offer support to resolving issues and crisis if you are humanitarian at heart both locally, regionally or globally. How do we prepare for tomorrow’s job today? Becoming a Hybrid Professional will put your skills in high demand.  In preparing for tomorrow’s job today, the human element will be necessary and still relevant. Human beings will be needed to create, develop, program and invent for the future.

At this stage of our growth and development and with Covid-19 with us two core words must always come to mind; Innovate and invent.  All jobs cannot be taken over by machines.  The human element will be very much needed and this where the Hybrid Professional comes in. There is still light at the end of the tunnel if we stick to the rules of the future of work protocols. All is not bleak, let’s not be desolate, new jobs will be created. Who ever thought an idea of an online community to virtually engage will be a good selling proposition. Zoom now, Skype, Google meet, Facebook and other social media sites have created some jobs which hitherto never existed. Our ability to think out of the box to solve problems and create solutions around us will shape our future of work, develop yourself to become hybrid professionals to put our skills in very high demand. 

What quick adjustments are you making to the future of work? For now Knowledge is a free commodity available everywhere on the globe. Hitherto, aside observation and class room education it was kind of difficult to acquire knowledge. With the click of the button you can have access to both very good and brilliant content as well as very bad and irrelevant content alike. Alas, knowing more is not a big deal as the application of what we know is the most vital.  Using what you know now to helping address challenges of our time, is going to put your skills in high demand.  We earlier realized from our soft skills previous discussion that credentials may not be very important if we lack soft skills. The future of work will look beyond hard skills.  As a hybrid professional, possessing the right skills will offer you a great competitive advantage. 

Skills and Occupational Transitions

Skills are the talent needed in order to do a job or a task. Job skills allow you to do a particular job whiles life skills help you through everyday tasks.  It might take determination and practice, but almost any skill can be learned or improved. On the other hand, skills are things that you can do or abilities that you require.  It is worth knowing that soft skills are non-technical skills that relate to how you work. They include how you interact with colleagues, solve problems, and manage your work.

The new normal is introducing technology transformation to the future workplace. Technology is altering the workplace and fundamentally changing the way companies around the world are hiring talent. Smart hiring strategies are now been considered and adopted.  Skills, be it technological and or “human” skills – are quickly becoming the new professional currency, a benchmark by which managers and human resource leaders are evaluating candidates. What skills set do you possess?

The future of work will introduce different kinds of transitions. We know that when you take into account the activities that are easy to automate, relatively, and the ones that are harder to automate, it will result in some occupations growing more than others. For instance, occupations that involve a lot of data gathering, data processing, or physical work are going to decline. The relatively harder occupations, and activities to automate, like care work and work that requires empathy, judgment, and so forth, those occupations are going to rise.

The mix of occupations is going to shift substantially. That means that people are probably going to have to move and be transitioned from certain occupations into new occupations, ones that are going to be growing. So that’s one kind of transition. You then need the right set of skills to enable you also move and work along those lines.

Another kind of transition is going to be the skill requirements. We know that the skill requirements are going to shift for a couple reasons. One, because people are moving to new occupations that are going to require higher skills, often, in order to perform those jobs; we know the skill requirements are going to go up, if only because people are going to be working alongside highly capable and increasingly capable machines.

In order for people to keep up, adapt, and work alongside effectively with highly capable machines, they will require a very different set of skills. So, the skill transitions are going to be quite substantial.

As leaders, it’s our job to help employees become flexible to the changing demands of work. Though no one can say for sure what new jobs will be created, we do know what kind of work will still require human input. That is where the hybrid professional comes in. Repetitive and predictable jobs will slowly disappear, but demand for non-routine work will persist. Technologies and trends will come and go, but whatever the future holds, the ability to look at problems from different perspectives and develop creative solutions will remain valuable. The same can be said for the ability to empathize and create meaningful connections with people. A growth mindset and the ability to continually learn will be key employee skills, and all employers will have to think of themselves as education centers that will continually train their workforce to adapt and evolve.

These competencies will become more important than ever for workplace success, and developing them will provide knowledge workers with a safety net against obsolescence. Skills will enable workers to be flexible and able to successfully adapt. Companies need to be focusing on continuous skill development now in order to prepare workers for the changing work landscape of the future.

In order to empower employees to enhance their skills in these core areas and encourage ongoing learning and personal growth, we need to create a culture of development as put forward by the McKinsey report on the future of work.

Becoming a FoReal Hybrid Professional

As work continues to evolve, trends will also originate. The future of work which was thought to be very far is fast approaching. Knowing our way around trends is very important for business survival and our own sustainability. The future of work will also introduce some new normal including; Working from home and not in offices,  the concept of a job for life won’t exist & the need for ‘Hybrid Professionals” will be in high demand among others.

‘Becoming a Hybrid Professional’ will put your skills in high demand. Hybrid professionals are professional who can work collaboratively across all (private, public and not-for-profit) sectors and use business solutions to tackle the world’s social and environmental problems.

As a consultant, lawyer, accountant, public servant or an entrepreneur, you need to develop the right skills set as a professional able to work across all sectors and industry when need be. This is the first global talent innovation and FoReal Hybrid Professional Program trains you to know how to become one. Reach out for support to know how to register freely to join the first of its kind global innovation to be a FoReal Hybrid Professional to promote effective self-management, greater empowered, greater teamwork, agile processes and emotional intelligence.

Hybrid Professionals must learn to upskill and reskill. To upskill is to provide training that enhances an employee’s existing skill set, allowing them to grow in their current role and bring added value to an organization. Reskilling is the process of learning or training someone on new skills that will help them do a different job. To reskill is essentially to retrain an employee for a new position. The difference between reskilling and up-skilling is this; when we reskill we learn new skills so you can do a different job, or to be able to train people to do a different job. Whereas to upskill, we focus more on improving worker’s skills so they can work within the same job.

Develop yourself to becoming a Hybrid Professional to help put your skills in very high demand now and in the future.

Baptista is the C.E.O of FoReal HR Services. She is a human resource professional with a broad generalist background. Building a team of efficient & effective workforce is her business. Affecting lives is her calling!  She is an HR Generalist, strategic planner, innovative, professional connector and a motivator. You can reach her via e-mail on [email protected]   You can follow this conversation on our social media pages Facebook / LinkedIn/ Twitter / Instagram: FoReal HR Services.   Call or WhatsApp: +233(0)262213313.  Follow the hashtag #theFutureofWorkCapsules #FoWC

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