March 10, 2024
With nearly 4 years of data collected, our users have identified the hottest skills to keep an eye on such as Product Management, Design Thinking, Analytics, UX Design and lots more.
When MuchSkills began in 2020, our mission was clear: to foster skills transparency throughout the workforce. This objective aimed to provide employees with the opportunity to engage in work aligned with their passions and energy — a scientifically proven approach for enhancing productivity and engagement levels across various industries.
So, initially, our core objective in building our skills management software was to map everyone’s skills in the organization, aiming to alleviate the skill fog that plagues most companies. However, as MuchSkills grew and gained widespread usage, the availability of granular skills data and feedback from our users allowed us to develop features that have helped MuchSkills evolve into the skills management powerhouse it is today. These features include a skills and competency matrix, certification tracking, organisational chart, skills gap analysis and a team builder tool.
Our latest skills dataset encompasses a wide range of skills added by our users to their profiles. In this blog, we delve into the top hard and soft skills people have on their profiles. Interestingly, many of the skills selected by our users align with those anticipated to be crucial up to 2025.
You may notice that several of the top skills are interrelated. For example, "problem-solving" requires "active listening" because, in the workplace, gaining a good understanding of the problems colleagues face is possible only when actively listening to them. As the saying goes, everything is connected!
A project can be anything – the development of a new app or tool, the construction of a building, a company’s efforts towards a digital transformation or the development of a channel partner program. Each of these projects has a clear start and a finish, a goal that has to be met and a budget in which it has to be achieved.
Here’s a succinct definition of project management by PMI:
“Project management can be defined as the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.”
Project management involves a number of processes – initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling and closing. Efficient project management is what determines whether your project will be successful or not.
The demand for project management skills has been high for over a decade, and this trend is likely to continue. In 2009, a report from the Economist Intelligence Unit found that 80% of survey respondents believed that having project management as a core competency had helped their organisations remain competitive during the 2008 recession. More recently, The Future of Project Management: Global Outlook 2019 report found that 74% of respondents of a survey thought that, in the future, project management skills will be more important than they are today.
This job focus has been gaining traction since 2012, and has been growing ever since. One can almost say that we are in a golden age for UX Designers with demand for this talent exploding along with Software Development. It makes sense, since they both go hand in hand, especially when designing digital products.
Mastering this skill requires people to have a high level of empathy as well as the ability to creatively problem solve. Almost any company that has a product that directly interfaces with customers, be it digital or offline, needs a User Experience Designer in their team. A great user experience designer should be able to process many layers of information in order to arrive at the most optimal solutions for customers. A mantra that most UX designers follow is the process of user-centric design, so if you want to understand how to work with a UX Designer or want to become one, familiarise yourself with their workflow and processes.
Often confused with Project Management, Product Management as a job focus has been growing in popularity as seen in our data since 2020. Product Managers often take higher-level decisions on product vision and goals. By taking into account business requirements, understanding technical limitations and focussing on customer needs, a good Product Manager ensures products don't get bloated with features and functions but instead keep their customers at the heart of every decision.
Product managers are often generalists that have good Business, Design and Technical knowledge to help them take more strategic decisions on product roadmap. They work closely with Project Managers when setting up OKRs and other requirements.
This is definitely one skill to watch, if you enjoy working across business verticals and enjoy the process of product innovation, this is a perfect field to get into.
“Design thinking is not a linear path. It’s a big mass of looping back to different places in the process.”
— David Kelley, Founder of Ideo and a pioneer of the concept of ‘design thinking’.
The design thinking skill is a creative approach to problem solving that entails understanding the needs of the user, understanding the context and culture of all stakeholders, questioning the problem and all assumptions associated with it, suggesting potential solutions, and testing these solutions. It is an iterative process that seeks to reframe the problem by putting the user at the centre. The five main stages of design thinking are: empathise – define – ideate – prototype – test. Several innovators use design thinking to create products and solutions that bring immense value to the lives of their customers.
Today, design thinking skills are essential to solve complex problems regardless of your job description or the industry you work in. This is possibly why a large number of MuchSkills users have put it down as one of their core skills.
User Interface (UI) Design involves the creation of the visual and interactive elements for an app, website, or device that humans interact with. This design discipline focuses on enhancing the user experience through the strategic organization of visual elements, navigation, and interactive features. Elements such as button placement, color choices, typography, and spacing are carefully considered. UI Design addresses aesthetics, accessibility, responsiveness, and usability to ensure a seamless and efficient interaction with the interface. The objective is to craft an intuitive, visually appealing, and user-friendly design that boosts user satisfaction and overall usability.
For example, consider a mobile banking app where the UI design determines the placement of buttons for essential functions, the color scheme for clarity and branding, and the overall layout to ensure easy navigation. These design choices impact how users interact with the app, influencing their ability to manage finances efficiently and satisfying their need for a user-friendly banking experience.
Humans have been problem solving for millennia. It is this skill that helped us in our evolution from primates.
Most of us apply problem-solving in our lives – be it at home or at the workplace. It can be something as simple as deciding what route to take back home from the office so that you can run a couple of errands along the way. In organisations too, most managers do some kind of problem solving every day; it is critical to the success of any business.
We found it interesting that MuchSkills users listed problem solving skills and creative problem solving as one of their top five soft skills because we developed this tool as a solution to a problem we noticed while working as consultants. The problem was that people across organisations were often unaware of each other’s strengths or skill sets. This led to miscommunications in meetings, unbalanced work allocations among staff for projects and eventually unhappy employees and clients.
We believe that organisations and teams that use MuchSkills will never have that problem because our skills visualization tool gives team managers and C-level executives a complete overview of the entire team’s skill sets in a single window, allowing them to pick the right people and skills for the right job as well as identify any skill gaps. We may be biased, but we believe MuchSkills’ visualized employee skills overview beats any employee skills matrix or competency matrix hollow.
Empathy is the capacity to put oneself in another’s position and to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. It involves putting yourself in someone else’s shoes to understand how they feel. It is different from sympathy, which begins and ends with feeling sorry for someone. How can you tell if you are an empathetic person? Some tell-tale signs are:
Being empathetic at the workplace means showing kindness and compassion for colleagues who are going through a rough time (professionally or personally), listening to their concerns, and taking an active interest in helping them out. Empathy makes you a capable communicator and improves your interpersonal relationships. What’s more, empathetic leadership is a force against employee burnout, which has remained at alarming levels for the past two years and more. According to a 2020 survey, 29% of employees wished their organisations would act with more empathy as a means to prevent burnout. This is just one reason why empathy – and not technical prowess or administrative capability – is considered the most important leadership skill today.
At a time of information overload, when the best of us passively listen to others – distracted by the many diversions of a technology-dominated life – active listening is one of the best communication skills a professional can have.
Listening skills are “one of the most important ways to engage employees,” says a report in Harvard Business Review. “Deep engagement does not begin with getting people to listen to you; it begins when you really listen to them.”
Active listening is one of the best ways you can really listen to people such as your colleagues or employees. It is the act of mindfully listening to someone speak, comprehend what is being said, responding and then remembering. An active listener also studies the body language of the speaker for visual cues that will help them comprehend what is being communicated. At the same time, the listener offers the speaker non-verbal cues – nods, eye contact and smiles – to indicate that they are paying attention to what they are saying.
At the workplace, active listening helps you build a connection of trust with the speaker, and helps identify and solve problems or conflicts that could hamper business performance.
Critical thinking is the capacity to approach decisions and beliefs with clarity and rationality, engaging in reflective and independent thought processes. It involves the ability to analyze and effectively break down an issue in order to make a decision or find a solution.
This skill is crucial for leadership development at the workplace and is particularly indispensable for roles that demand problem-solving, decision-making, and creativity.
Proficiency in human skills like emotional intelligence (EQ) and cultural intelligence (CQ) enhances critical thinking, influencing complex decision-making outcomes.
Individuals possessing critical thinking skills demonstrate the following abilities:
Critical thinking shouldn’t be confused with accumulating information. It is not just about having a good memory or extensive factual knowledge. Individuals with critical thinking abilities have the capacity to infer outcomes from their knowledge, analyze it, utilize information for effective problem-solving, and actively seek sources to deepen their knowledge and comprehension.
It's unsurprising that critical thinking ranks high on the list of soft skills, given its crucial role, particularly in the contemporary knowledge economy. In this dynamic environment, leaders need to adeptly and promptly respond to changes, making critical thinking an essential skill.
Interestingly, analytical thinking and creative thinking, integral components of the Critical Thinking process, are identified as the foremost skills for workers in 2023, as highlighted in a World Economic Forum Report. The report emphasized that analytical thinking is acknowledged as a fundamental skill by a higher number of companies compared to any other skill, comprising, on average, 9% of the core skills reported by these companies.
Willingness to learn is a soft skill that reflects an individual's openness, enthusiasm, and proactive attitude toward acquiring new knowledge, skills, and experiences. It involves the eagerness to explore, adapt, and continuously develop one's abilities in response to evolving circumstances.
Willingness to learn is considered a crucial soft skill by 85% of hiring managers when evaluating job candidates, according to a 2022 survey.
This soft skill is vital in dynamic and ever-changing work environments. A strong willingness to learn fosters personal and professional growth, enhances adaptability, and ensures that individuals remain relevant and valuable contributors in their respective fields. It enables employees to embrace innovation, tackle new challenges, and contribute to a culture of continuous improvement within an organization. Additionally, a genuine openness to learning demonstrates resilience and a forward-thinking mindset, traits highly valued in today's competitive and rapidly evolving job market.
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