5 Mistakes to avoid when Upskilling for the Future

Learning and upskilling for the future are important subjects. Lots of organisations and professionals are aware of the need to learn and develop skills for the future. And while ‘WHY should they do it?’ seems to be obvious, figuring out ‘WHAT skills should they focus on?’ and ‘HOW should they develop them?’ are some of the biggest challenges people face. Here are 5 common mistakes I see very often being made in the decision process.

1. Confusing learning about the skills with mastering them

Knowing a lot about something is not the same as being good at it. Knowing a lot about leadership doesn’t make one a good leader. Understanding what contributes to your productivity won’t necessarily make you productive. Thinking you can learn to do something by simply listening to how others do it, or attending a single workshop on a subject is often the same as thinking you can lose some weight by watching someone exercise. Practice, experience, learning by doing, the ability to apply knowledge in own context are things that make one skilful.

Whenever you are considering any skill development, ask yourself whether how you are going about it will help you to simply learn about something, or will you actually master the skill? Don’t just focus on learning about something. Application is the hardest part and where most of your support, attention and focus should be.

2. Investing only in work/position specific skills

Most HR departments would approve sending their employees to the training that is relevant to their current position, but very few would do the same for something that is not directly linked to that job. If you are a project manager, learning about blockchain will not necessarily translate into an increase in productivity, efficiency or customer satisfaction. It may, however, help you to come up with brilliant new ideas, become a valuable asset to a transdisciplinary team, or allow you to grow into a new role. While predicting the exact nature of the demand for skills is impossible, the recent research reveals that investment in workforce reskilling and human capital development is a ‘no-regret action’.

Go beyond just the development of skills necessary for your current roles. Support curiosity to learn new things. That is what makes you flexible, adaptable and resilient in the long term.

3. Focusing only on upskilling of an individual

Whether one can apply their skills successfully is not just defined by people’s competence and skillfulness. You can teach someone how to handle their time efficiently, but it would be a useless skill in a place where cognitive overload, working too many hours, a meeting culture and excessive digital communication are the norm. You can do lots of creativity training, but it won’t be much use in a company that doesn’t encourage and support creativity or provide a chance for people to be creative.

Don’t just focus on learning of the individual. Address upskilling for the future on different levels: individual, team, management, organisation. Culture, environment and external factors can often define the success of upskilling more than anything else.

4. Focusing on knowledge based skills

While the need to train for knowledge based skills seems to obvious for lots of companies, the development of soft/life skills is very often incidental or completely nonexistent. You can train people in coding languages, data analysis and project management, but soft skills such as load management, communication and self management, for example, are the basis of people’s ability to work productively with that knowledge, so they can function as team members and deliver results. Disregarding investing in life skills often results in unhappy, disengaged employees who are unable to live up to their full potential, no matter how great their knowledge of something is.

Treat soft skills as top priority work skills. Knowledge is just the first part of the equation; you need to continuously develop many other abilities and skills to be able to use it.

5. Looking for answers in ‘Top 10 Skills Lists’

It is easy to get lost in all those ‘Top 10 Skills of the Future Lists’. If you look into most existing skills of the future lists (like the Top 10 Skills of the World Economic Forum), you will find that most of the skills listed are big concepts. None of those skills are actually one thing. For example, critical thinking might require the ability to analyse and weigh information, create knowledge, understand probabilities, biases and statistics, and work with data. Each of those things is a skill by itself that can be even further split into a number of subskills and abilities.

Furthermore, those top skills are contextual. The context is important to understand what the skill means. Critical thinking in the work of a high school teacher means different things, compared to the critical thinking needed in the work of a data analyst. Context and application matter. Interested in developing the skills of the future? Forget overused concepts and ‘Top 10 Lists’. Start with your own context.

Think about your challenges

Look into your challenges in the years to come: e.g. aligning your competencies to AI, battling cognitive overload, dealing with career transitions, being able to work safely in the digital environment, etc. Find the concrete challenges and points of need you have, then work backwards. What skills do you need to be able to address them? Chances are high that in the process of learning skills to deal with your challenges, you will develop a great deal of skills from any ‘Top 10 List’, but mastering them wouldn’t be the end goal, dealing with your present/future challenges would. Skill development is not an end, it is just a means to an end: creating the future you want to be part of.

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