How to Make Sure Your Career Skills Are Up to Date in 2023

Inside: Wondering about how to make sure your career skills are up to date for 2023 and beyond? This guest post from Artur Meyster of Career Karma will keep you prepared for the modern economy.

As a modern-day professional, keeping your career skills up to date for the future of work should be your top priority.

If you are in a heavily tech-based field, your technical skills may be top-notch right now, but the field is evolving quickly. If you are an exceptional manager who excels in an in-person setting, 2020 may have taught you that virtual management is a whole other ball game.

The workforce is moving in a new direction and you need to keep up!

4 Ways to Keep Your Career Skills Updated

With that in mind, it’s important to identify the skills you have now and the skills that will be needed in the future to find the overlap. Then, consider looking into the different ways that you can keep your skills up to date for the future of work.

Below are four ways to kickstart the process.

Boost your career skills for 2020 and beyond

1. Study Technological Trends

One of the best ways to keep your career skills up to date is to study the tech trends dominating the world today. Technology can, and does, disrupt every industry. Specifically, in 2020, artificial intelligence and machine learning have the potential to cause widespread disruption that has never been seen before.

On that note, one of the most popular tech skills now is coding. In the last decade, coding has become a valuable skill for any employee to hold and has given rise to entire fields. Keeping yourself knowledgeable of even basic facts, such as what Python is used for or which coding language is the best to learn, can give you an edge over those unfamiliar with modern skills.

However, remember that trends come and go, so what you see now may not be a useful skill in 10 years. Therefore, the best path forward is to see if the skills involved with the trends you’re seeing are being asked for by employers in job descriptions.

2. Gain Additional Education

Continuing your education is one of the best ways to keep your career skills sharp and be ready for the future of work. Educational institutions often offer clear insight into which fields will become prominent and which are dying out. Niche covers some of the top college majors and fields that are becoming disrupted by technology.

Returning to obtain additional education to keep your skills up to date can be done through a variety of sources. For example, trade schools have been rising in popularity and feature specialized courses that prepare students for certain career paths. These are often extremely time-consuming forms of education, however, and can take up to a year to complete.

Should you need a faster source of updating your skills, coding boot camps are a fantastic choice to learn valuable tech skills. In the last few years, other tech-based fields have had boot camps emerge, such as data science, which goes to show how useful this method of education is.

4. Refine Your Soft Skills

At the end of the day, you may not have the technical skills needed to launch a career in tech. You also may not have the desire to even take the time to learn those skills, which is completely fine. If you are in this boat, there is still something you can do to prepare your skillset for the future of work.

Focus on developing your soft skills. Employers don’t just look for who is the most capable of completing the functions of a job, but rather look for well-rounded people capable of tackling a variety of tasks. Develop your interpersonal skills and your adaptability to show potential employers that you can switch what you are doing on a dime and are flexible enough to learn new information associated with your job.

Conclusion

There is no guarantee that the skills you use now will apply to the future of work. The workforce goes through periods of disruption and creativity causes new jobs to emerge that use new skills. While that can be overwhelming, it’s also an opportunity!

Ensure that you are watching the job market to see what skills are being required of employees, and then focus on adapting your own skillet to match that need.

Many thanks to Arthur and Career Karma for these important tips. Lean into the career skills you’ve worked hard to hone, open yourself up to build new skills, and you’ll find more doors opening up as you take on the next stage of your career.

Curious about what transferable skills you already have, especially if you are a mom looking to re-enter the workforce, head right here!