Promote Yourself (5 page)

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Project management

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Financial management

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Budgeting

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Contract negotiating

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Sales forecasting

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Engineering (mechanical or software)

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Using office software

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Proficiency in a second language

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Web design

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Business writing

So how important are hard skills? Let me give you a few numbers. My company surveyed 1,000 managers and 1,000 young workers about hard skills. Here's what we found:

 

• Sixty-five percent of managers and 61 percent of young workers said that having technical ability is a “very important” or “the most important” factor when considering employees for management roles.

 

• Eighty percent of managers and 79 percent of young workers said that having strategic thinking and analytical skills is a “very important” or “the most important” factor when considering employees for management roles.

Besides helping you get and keep jobs, hard skills also allow you to move within your organization. Say you're an administrative assistant at a large company. You hate what you're doing but you need the paycheck and the benefits. There's a job open in IT, and you're thinking of applying—even though you have no formal training. I can pretty much guarantee that you won't get the job unless you can demonstrate some significant hard skills in IT. But if you
do
have those hard skills, well, that's a completely different story.

Oana Kelsay, who's a Global Logistics Planner at Johnson & Johnson, was able to leverage her hard skills—which she'd developed on her own—to move quickly out of her entry-level job. As a college student, she took a job at Johnson & Johnson in their Customer Service department as a way to pay for her education. She says, “I was quite the techie from high school on, so when I joined J&J I quickly became known as the unofficial IT, and my fellow CS reps would call on me to help them solve their problems. Thankfully, I had a great manager who understood my skill set, and when the Customer Service department launched SAP to replace its old AS400, she quickly had me trained on the new system so I could become an SAP power user, assist in solving issues, test the new system, and train my colleagues. I ended up moving to the department I'm currently in, Strategic Planning.”

And none of that would have happened if Oana hadn't developed hard skills outside and in addition to her basic responsibilities.

 

Identifying the Skills You Need—Especially if You're Eying a New Position

If you're going to do your current job well, you have to know which hard skills are required. And if you're thinking about making a lateral—or upward—move within your company, you'll need to find out the hard skills your
new
job requires. There are a few ways to do this.

The most logical place to start is by reading the job description, since most job descriptions include a list of required skills. But because job descriptions don't always prioritize required skills in a useful way, you should also talk to your manager and drop in to visit the friendly folks in HR. Ask them what skills you'd need to have to do the job you've got your eye on. If you'll need more than one skill, which one should you start with? And how can you go about learning those skills—does the company have in-hours training? Will they pay for you to take classes elsewhere, or are you on your own?

It's also a good idea to talk with people who are doing the job you want to do. HR or managers may give you a list of officially required skills, but someone who's in the trenches every day will have a much better idea of what's
really
needed to succeed, and the two lists may or may not overlap. Paul Di Maria, a senior manager at a leading market research firm, does a fantastic job of learning by listening. “I ask around for best demonstrated practices when I feel like my work is getting stale,” Paul says. “I also latch on to any opportunity where I get to listen to people that are tops in my field. That interaction is precious. I hope to know a quarter of what they do, and they never stop learning and developing themselves.”

All that face-to-face talking sounds a little old-school. So don't forget about online resources. LinkedIn has become a media company and is now, in a sense, an extension of the face-to-face conversation: LinkedIn captures the most shared content in their system—these are the topics that people feel are the most important—and organizes it by category on
linkedin.com/today
. Depending on your interests, you can customize the type of content and news you see. LinkedIn also has a service called “Thought Leaders” that features exclusive blogs from big-name people like Richard Branson. It's a great opportunity to learn from the best.

If you're interested in a particular job,
Onetoline.org
will tell you the exact skills you'll need to be successful. It's a great resource whether you're hoping to move up in your department or are planning to change fields entirely. You'll get a clear picture of what life is like for people currently in that position, including what they do over the course of any workday, and classes you'll need to take to stay current. For example, if you're interested in being a financial analyst, you'll need to be able to evaluate the quality of securities, be proficient in financial analysis and spreadsheet software, and have a good working knowledge of finance and accounting. You'll also be able to find out the education requirements, median salary, and even the number of current and projected openings.

 

A Brief Pause …

Once you know the skills you need, there's an important step that you have to do before you can get out there and start acquiring them. What I'm talking about is doing an honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, what you're best at and what you might need to improve. The goal is to home in on the hard skills you can develop that will help you become the subject matter expert you want to be—the go-to person on a particular topic, the one people come to whenever they've got questions, whether it's because you're a Microsoft Excel power user, you're a whiz at creating smartphone apps, or you're the only one in your office who knows the obscure Indian dialect that is the only language your supplier speaks. The more people seek you out, the more in-demand your skills, the more valuable you'll be to your company.

 

Strengths or Weaknesses?

Whenever I talk about strengths and weaknesses, I always get the same question: Is it better to focus on developing strengths or overcoming weaknesses?

Unfortunately, there's no absolute right or wrong answer; you need to do what you feel most comfortable doing. Some people find it more effective to develop their strengths. Some, like Lisa Stewart, Assistant Vice President, e-Exchange, at State Street—a Fortune 500 financial services company—find it better to work on overcoming weaknesses. “I focus more on finding my weaknesses so I can improve them before someone else finds them. I don't want to give management any reasons to want to replace me.” And still others put an equal emphasis on both. “I need to know and exercise my strengths to ensure that I won't lose them,” says J&J's Oana Kelsay. “I need to acknowledge and work on my weaknesses so that I can quickly turn them into strengths. I have this obsessive need to be the best at everything, and I know I can't do that unless I know both my strengths and weaknesses.”

While the choice is yours, I recommend that you develop your strengths. When you focus on developing your strengths, you'll see results sooner than if you had spent the same amount of time on overcoming your weaknesses. That will give you more confidence. Plus, it's generally more fun to do and learn about things you're already good at. And when you're enjoying yourself, you're likely to want to keep learning and developing your skills even more. There are exceptions though. For instance, if you know you've got a weakness that could potentially hurt or limit your career (in terms of hard skills, that might be something like wanting to become a financial analyst without knowing anything about statistics), your first priority should be to resolve that weakness. What I want you to do here is identify your hard skills. Not all of them, of course, just the ones that could affect your performance, give you an advantage, make you stand out on the job, or that could affect your ability to get a job in the first place.

So, ask yourself the following questions and come up with a list of your top five to ten strengths:

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What am I the best at?

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What do others say I'm good at? (In a lot of ways, this is more important than what you think of yourself.)

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What does my job require me to be good at?

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What matters at the job and do I have the right skills to excel?

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What skills do I need to have to get me my next promotion or raise—whether it's where I'm working now or somewhere else?

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What else do I need to know to get to the next level in a career here or at any other company?

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Am I playing to my strengths in team settings and making my team more successful?

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Do my coworkers and managers know what my strengths are and do they see them as contributing to the team's success?

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Are my strengths being underutilized? If so, why, and what can I do about it?

Got a pretty good handle on your strengths? Great! Now let's take a quick look at areas where you could improve. Yes, I know I've been saying to focus on your strengths, but we all have weaknesses, and ignoring them could undermine your performance and limit your career mobility. Ask yourself these questions and put together a list of five to ten weaknesses (the ones you want to focus on are the ones that could—or do—affect your current or future job):

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What could I improve on? What do I think I should be better at?

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Are my weaknesses preventing me from doing my job correctly or from excelling on the job?

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Has my manager given me feedback about my weaknesses?

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Which weaknesses do I need to focus on in order to improve at work?

If you're having trouble with compiling lists of strengths and weaknesses, don't be shy about asking the people you work with to help you. Consider it a kind of informal peer review. Two important caveats: Ask for feedback only from people you trust. Second, don't do this too often. This may sound a bit silly, but a lot of employers I work with complain that too many of their young workers are constantly asking, “How'm I doing?” If you're constantly trying to get people to tell you what they think, you run the risk of being perceived as someone who can't work independently, who needs too much hand-holding, and who's not leadership material.

Instead of indiscriminately hounding your manager or your coworkers for feedback on your performance, try to find the proper time. For instance, if your manager brings up a certain skill of yours that you aren't confident about, ask how you can improve it. Similarly, if you've used Excel to put together a financial projection but a colleague comments that your numbers are off, that's the perfect time to ask for some guidance on what you can do to improve your Excel skills.

Another creative way to get feedback is to have a weekly conversation/meeting with your manager to review your progress. Tell him what you're working on and be honest with what you're having trouble with. People usually like being asked for help—as long as you don't go overboard.

Well, that's how things would be in an ideal world. In reality in most cases, unless it's an official performance review, most people won't come right out and tell you about your weaknesses (your strengths, maybe) even if you ask. It seems too rude. So you may have to play sociologist. If you pay close attention to the way people respond to what you say and do, you'll get a lot of nonverbal feedback—facial expressions, body language, tone of voice. (Since reading people is a soft skill, we'll tackle it in the next chapter.)

And while you're talking to people, if you know you've got some skills that they aren't aware of, speak up! For example, John Gerzema, Executive Chairman of BrandAsset Consulting, who oversees strategy for Young & Rubicam Companies, told me a great story about an employee who took the initiative to let John know about some skills that were being underutilized. “Recently I had a young and promising analyst approach me about training. As the company I run specializes in brand strategy steeped in analytics, I assumed that he wanted more mentoring in quant and data. But as we sat down, he explained to me that in his off-hours he's a photographer and documentary filmmaker, and he felt that this side of him wasn't being used in the company. ‘We're a branding company after all, so why wouldn't we want to access these skills?' he told me. Moreover, by working all day crunching numbers, he felt his creative side was beginning to atrophy.” Impressed by this young analyst's passion, John did two things. First, he transferred the employee to Chicago (where the company's film, photography, and graphic design offices are) so he could be closer to a creative community. Second, John restructured his job so he was using his filmmaking and photography skills. “But the main thing I took away from all this,” John added, “is that Millennials aren't defined by their jobs. Their jobs are merely one part of a bigger mosaic. In Hollywood, the more hyphens you have, the more power. Someone who's an Actor-Writer-Director-Producer, for instance, is going to get more walks down the red carpet than someone who wears only one hat. And that's what my analyst was telling me: ‘There are more sides to me than you understand or can empathize with. And if you don't see them, you might not be seeing me for long.'”