5 Areas To Improve Your Job Competence – Jobs & Careers

The world of work is changing rapidly, and the skills that are required in today’s labor market may not be the same ones you will need tomorrow. Because of this, it is important to be aware of what skills you do have and what skills you will need to acquire in order to stay competitive in your workplace.

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What you will learn about Jobs & Careers

Here are the subtopics we are covering in the article series on “Jobs & Careers”

• How To Transform Your Passion Into Business – Jobs & Careers
• How To Find A Better Job – Jobs & Careers
• How To Improve Your Job Competence – Jobs & Careers
• 5 Areas To Improve Your Job Competence – Jobs & Careers
• Learning About The Future Of Work In Africa With Prof Tawana Kupe

Improving competence and gaining new professional skills is an important factor in career growth, which is another motivation for working on self-empowerment.

Employees need well-defined competencies to successfully contribute in their workplace. These competencies also provide key competitive differentiators, as well as help ensure consistent performance standards.

In today’s discussion, we will consider the new areas of job competence and how they might affect your position in the labor market.

Some Of The Recent Changes

One of the most recent events of our time is the global pandemic and you know this. According to Harvard Business Review, Covid19 has drastically reshaped the economy, the labor force, how we work, where we work, and the technologies we use to stay connected among businesses and individuals.

In another piece, “How COVID-19 is changing the world: A statistical perspective”, available at Unicef.org, you will read that “COVID-19 has turned the world upside down. Everything has been impacted.

The article added that how we live and interact with each other has been affected, including how we work and communicate, how we move around, and how we travel. That is the true picture of the situation and even for you too, I can imagine.

But wait. Has all the changes now harshly affected our jobs and careers solely due to covid19? Well, the answer is no.

Even before the outbreak of covid19, different experts have been debating all over the place about the new kind of jobs or how we will work in the future. This has partly been due to the long evolution of our economic systems and the advancement in technology, which has accelerated activities across various industries.

Therefore, these changes are by no means accidental. So, we better prepare ourselves for the challenges ahead or we shall have ourselves to blame.

Now, what are these new areas of job competence we need to improve on today?

The new areas of competence in the market are more than five and that should be apparent. But the following are vitally important, so pay attention to them.

Improve your competence in innovation and creativity

What could be the role of creativity in your new jobs and career? Now, imagine you are a business leader with an important responsibility on your shoulder in this rapidly changing ecosystem. As an innovative and creative leader, you can easily envision new strategies to grow your business, despite the challenges.

Look around today and you will see many big companies and local businesses that are folding up. Sometimes, business management requires more than what you have read in books and learned in schools. This is an extraordinary time, and you are going to need some level of innovation and creativity to navigate your ship out of the troubled water.

According to an article by Harvard Business Review, The Future Work Leaders would be responsible for analyzing what kind of skills will be most essential as the workforce continues to evolve.

“This role” added the article, would focus both on setting the organization’s strategy for the future of work, as well as proposing reskilling and upskilling efforts for current employees.

Innovation and creativity are going to be very important for future works, if not already such an essential factor in many industries today.

So, if you want to remain relevant in today’s job market and pursue a successful career, you must sharpen your thinking and your ability to see things differently.

Learn about data literacy for your Job & career goal

Although currently, only a few companies are building real analytic competence into their personnel to address key challenges, data literacy is very important for many businesses today, and it’s going to be even more vital in the years to come.

What is data literacy? 

For those who are hearing the term for the first time, data literacy is the ability to derive meaningful information from data, which in this case is the collection of facts, such as:

• Numbers,
• Words,
• Measurements,
• Observations,
• Or simply the descriptions of things.

The challenge of data analysis, especially when dealing with big data, is that data literacy requires some knowledge of mathematics and statistics.

So, if you are very poor in these areas, you might struggle more in dealing with data in the new knowledge economy.

Of course, this is not to say that these types of competence have been irrelevant in all the stages of our economic and career evolution, over the years.

What it simply means is that as our economic systems evolve more and more into a knowledge-based economy, more data literacy is going to be required for businesses to function and to smoothly interact at a global level.

Machine learning and human-machine collaboration

Now, what is machine learning? Well, machine learning is the study of computer systems that improve automatically through experience. It is seen by many experts as a branch of artificial intelligence, the big dominance of the new economy.

Over the years and in different business operations, a lot has happened within the area of artificial intelligence and automation. As robotic operation increases in different companies, it has become clear that there is a need for human-machine collaboration in the workforce.

This is due to the known fact that no matter how sophisticated machines have become, especially in recent years, there is still some significant level of limitations. Computers do not think or have human empathy, important qualities that have remained essential in our evolutionary history.

On the other hand, robots are very good at the kind of jobs that rely heavily on computer-related abilities, such as pattern recognition and data analysis. It is at this junction that humans and machines have met to collaborate for better results.

So, as we move into the future, there is a growing necessity for new management roles that will focus on how machines and humans can work together and spontaneously.

Now, imagine yourself having an edge on Machine Learning and the act of human-machine collaboration, you would have secured your position in the market and can write your own check.

This is what we are here talking about, to improve your human competence so you won’t only survive but thrive in your career.

Improve your competence in software and software development

Although it’s not completely new, one other important area of new job competence is software development. As a Software Developer, you will need to be good at the following:

• Researching,
• Designing,
• Implementing,
• And managing software programs.

Those are important because you will need to continuously test and evaluate new software programs. And to do this, you must be able to identify the areas for modification in existing programs and possibly come up with the required changes to get better results.

According to TechnoJobs, a UK-based website on jobs and careers, the role of Software Developers “Can range from creating internal programs that can help businesses be more efficient, to producing systems that can be sold on the open market.”

TechnoJobs added that “Once software developers have delivered the final software system, they will also help in maintaining and updating the programs, to ensure that all security problems are fixed, and it operates with new databases.”

If you look at that from the standpoint of job security and relevance in the market, it will mean that if a software developer is good, his or her job is almost guaranteed, despite the ups and downs in the market today.

Though not all, these are some of the areas of competence you can improve on for a better job and career development in today’s economy.

Your key takeaways 5 areas to improve your job competence

Improve Job Competence is absolutely important today. How does this concern you? You might ask. Well, just wait.

What if I tell you that most of the jobs around you today, including, probably yours might not be available in a few years from today?

Except you have been living under a rock, you will understand that what I have just said is the likely situation. So, pay attention to what we have discussed about the new jobs to look out for, and how to get yourself prepared, going forward.

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