Consider your current job, or a previous one you’ve been in, and the top five to 10 skills you use every day. How many of these skills are highly specific to the role?
For example, your ability to use a specific system or programme. And how many, although crucial to the role, aren’t necessarily exclusive to that position? For example, your ability to speak in public or work well with others. You’ll probably find that most of the skills you use on a daily basis fall into the latter category.
These core transferable skills are also referred to as workplace skills as they are key to your performing to the best of your abilities at work and functioning well within your team. To illustrate just how important these skills are, imagine a team tasked with researching a certain topic. While the individual members may be excellent researchers, their project may be slowed down if the team fails to communicate effectively and share their findings.
So which skills should you be thinking about? On the AMBA Career Development Centre, our animated video Workplace Skills Explained splits workplace skills up into two categories: people skills and business skills.
People skills include teamwork, leadership and management, delegation, networking, customer focus and wider communication skills. Business skills include everything from problem solving and decision making to commercial awareness, presentation, organisation and IT skills.
The first step in developing your workplace skills is to reflect on the skills you already possess, identifying your strengths and areas of improvement. Our ‘Developing self-awareness’ path helps you get some perspective, with advice on ‘Recognising strengths & weaknesses’, ‘How to uncover your full skillset’ and how to answer: ‘What’s your working style?’ You may also want to try our Career Assessments which can give you a more detailed insight into areas such as ‘Assertiveness’, ‘Management Skills’ and ‘Customer Focus.
Identified any gaps in your skillset?
Our ‘Improving workplace skills’ path can help you address those gaps with articles, videos and e-learning such as ‘5 steps to improve your intercultural skills’ and ‘Becoming a good listener’ to help you develop key people skills. It also looks at the business skills side of things, with ‘Public speaking tips’ and ‘Creating a great presentation’.
In addition to this, our ‘Business Skills’ category in the e-learning hub contains a wealth of in-depth e-learning courses on everything from Customer service and Project management to Leadership, Meetings and Business writing.
Whichever role you are in, it’s important that you invest time into developing and polishing these key workplace skills so that you can be the best team member, colleague and employee you can be – it will help you now and in the future.
