What soft skills are required?
The technical skills often demanded include user experience and analytics. However, soft skills are also required, according to the Harvard Business Review, and in particular the following:
- teamwork
- leadership
- communication
Critical thinking, creativity and collaboration are also wanted. Adaptability might be even more important than the number of coding languages a candidate knows. To push digitalisation forward, companies need people who are able to collaborate, accept that mistakes can happen – and rebound quickly when they do.
Teams matter, not individuals
You will always need people with PhDs and MBAs. However, you should also recruit from non-STEM graduates and consider people who don’t have a college degree. Leaders in agile organisations don’t always come from the best universities. If you hire a programmer who doesn’t have a masters degree, that person may never become a corporate officer; however, they still can be a highly valuable colleague on a team.
Incentivise your hires to grow
Reward higher skill levels with better compensation and benefits. What can also be attractive is greater responsibility. Employees usually know where they need to improve and since there are many ways available to do that, many companies don’t bother to offer much training.
There is a lot of content accessible online. For many relevant disciplines there are free or affordable online courses focussing on, for instance:
- machine learning
- Python and R
Employees should be allowed to educate themselves also during working hours. Overall, however, further education does not have to be spoon-fed to high-potential employees.
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