Focus on These Skills If You're Worried About AI Taking Your Job

Organisations of all shapes and sizes will pivot rapidly to respond to the disruption created by AI, and so will you.

Your work will change in the coming years, no matter your industry or role.

First and foremost: whatever your skillset is, stop differentiating yourself by doing more faster, and focus on the impact you can have and put it first persistently.

Prioritise soft skills. Every time organisations and industries try to adapt to new technologies, a lot of people collaborate to figure out how to make it happen.

Communication

Practice active listening and receiving feedback, as clear communication leads to clear thinking and makes your ideas fly. Sharing information clearly and concisely is critical to making you and your work visible and valued.

Facilitation

Guiding effective group work helps you establish yourself as a driving force behind the tangible impact. Making a group work together towards a common goal is an invaluable asset for any organisation.

Collaboration with experts

Tomorrow's problems will only get harder to wrap your head around and require more experts to collaborate with. Learning to work effectively with people much smarter than you will become an increasingly valuable skill.

Develop leadership skills, even if it's not a part of your title yet.

Growing others

The most significant impact you can have is levelling up your colleagues. Helping others grow is an invaluable demonstration that you can scale your expertise effectively enough for others to absorb and reuse.

Managing up and sideways

Framing your work as a part of a bigger picture and high-level goals help to make your work visible higher up. Managing sideways enables better collaboration with peers and makes your work visible across domains and organisational units. Both can be crucial to your team's or project's success.

Focus on the outcome

Try everything you can to shift focus on the value you can create, not the output you can produce. When explaining or presenting your work, always embed it in a broader context and emphasise not what it is but what value it creates.

Specialise and find a niche where your experience overlaps your interests and the market demand.

Work-related

Any industry or domain-specific skills could be transferred between related industries or enable you to work on similar problems while exploring different industries.

Interest-related

Combining your work-related experience with your interest in music production, coffee growing, or hiking equipment may give you extra focus on personal growth and open unobvious opportunities.

So why it's so hard to niche? Doing what you want is easy; figuring out what you want to be doing is the hard part.

Each new technology makes every industry generate more exciting problems to work on.

Professionally, you are what you do with your time, so start figuring out how to spend it on something satisfying today.