What are some of the most important skills for the future? I'll put my answers in thread over next 7 days, pls join me.

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The future is going to be filled with knowledge workers, who are working from anywhere, any time, almost independently, using async communication and technology. Therefore, to be an efficient and effective worker in the future, knowledge workers need to have T-shaped skills.

According to Wikipedia, it’s described as:

The concept of T-shaped skills, or T-shaped persons is a metaphor used in job recruitment to describe the abilities of persons in the workforce.

The vertical bar on the letter T represents the depth of related skills and expertise in a single field, whereas the horizontal bar is the ability to collaborate across disciplines with experts in other areas and to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than one’s own.

The first T-shaped skill in my list is Analytics.

I am using the term Analytics very loosely and broadly here as it includes all kinds of metrics and measurements.

Firstly, it’s important for a knowledge worker to have a very good understanding of their own performance and throughput.

Secondly, business metrics such as customer acquisition, engagement, conversion are critical for a knowledge worker to know so that they can make trade-off decisions when prioritising work.

More to come tomorrow!

The second skill is writing. Being able to communicate effectively is one of the essential skills for knowledge workers. In this day and age where many of your team members are likely distributed and remote work is the norm, async written communication is a recommended medium.

Whether it’s emails, memos, blog posts or documentation, it’s necessary to keep your content crisp, clear and engaging.

So how does one learn to write?

Writing is one of those skills that you get better with deliberate and consistent practice. I can say this with certainty because English isn’t my first language and I didn’t start speaking English or writing proper English until I was 15.

My usual advice for knowledge workers to hone their writing skill is by starting a blog. You can read more about my blogging journey here https://eisabainyo.net/weblog/2020/09/03/compelling-reasons-for-software-developers-to-start-a-blog/. But if you are not comfortable to start a blog straight away yet, start by committing to write 100 words a day.