[ANNOUNCER]:              

Breaking down everyday workplace issues and diagnosing the hidden sickness, not just the obvious symptom. Our hosts, James and Kobe.

[COBY]:             

Did we lose a patient?

[JAMES]:          

No, that’s just my lunch.

[COBY]:             

Hey, thanks for joining us. I’m Coby. He’s James. And let’s get started with a question. What skills are required to be successful?

[JAMES]:          

The short answer is that to be successful in pretty much anything, you need a blend of the technical understanding of what you’re doing. So if we’re talking about a job, you need to know how your job is performed, which we commonly refer to as technical skills. And you need skills that are going to help you to be able to work with others, to collaborate, to communicate effectively. And we usually call these soft skills. The challenge is that while technical skills are pretty easy to identify and measure, do you know how to code using Python or HTML? Well, that’s a yes or no question. Do you know how to disassemble and reassemble a car engine? Yes or no? Do you know the legislative requirements in your jurisdiction to ensure that your company maintains its legal requirements? These are all things that can be pretty easily proven and measured. Whether or not you have that technical understanding of what is required for the job performance. What’s usually referred to as soft skills, or even worse language in my mind, is calling them essential skills. They’re much more difficult to measure. Sure, you can measure effective communication. It can be identified through your recruitment process. But what about a person’s ability to work with others? What about their ability to collaborate or to innovate, or to coach and lead and mentor? I think the entire language of soft skills and essential skills is just way too broad. It’s too ill defined and it’s too weak of language for many businesses to take it seriously.

[COBY]:             

Yeah, I think that this is something that we’ve always kind of run into when we talk about, because we talk about things around recruitment or talent development or leadership development or those kinds of things like that is people kind of hate mentioning or bringing up soft skills or essential skills. There’s always kind of disclaimers that kind of go around it. But before I kind of get into that point, I kind of wanted to add something to what you said about technical skills. Technical skills are really the job duty specific skills. So, I mean, you talked about some good examples, but it’s not just like tech stuff. It’s like, can you bake bread that’s soft and light? Can you schedule your time to hit all the places you have to do on your route? Can you be able to operate the machinery or the computer or use the phone. Technical skills are very broad, but it’s really, can you perform the job duties? Is really kind of what it kind of comes down to. So I kind of wanted just to add on to that.

[JAMES]:          

But even with that, I mean, it makes sense why so many people focus on the technical skills because they are largely duty related. Yes or no, can you perform this task?

[COBY]:             

Yeah, you’re right. And when we talk about this through the lens of recruitment, usually it’s a lot easier to identify technical skills through experience. Like if you’ve used this equipment before and you were employed there for over a year, I can assume that you’ve got some level of technical proficiency with that equipment or. You know what I mean? It’s easier to make assumptions about the presence of technical skills based on experience in the recruitment job interview process. Right. Which is, I think because of that easy assumption to make is why it’s a bit more, like you say, it’s a bit easier to kind of measure it and kind of, again, make it clear that those probably exist based on x, y and z, whereas the existence of the soft skills and everything is really important. And we want to be very clear those terms that we’re not necessarily in love with. Essential skills and soft skills, what they represent, are vastly important. But you’re right, the terms themselves, no one likes the term soft skills. Everybody hates it. And then essential skills was kind of used as a replacement for essential skills or sorry for soft skills, because everyone knows that everyone hates the term soft skills, but people, it’s also come not that well defined. It’s really abstract, it’s hard to visualize.

[JAMES]:          

To do what. Right.

[COBY]:             

Yeah.

[JAMES]:          

The reason why there’s often so much pushback against the language of soft skills is because, well, calling them soft makes them sound weak. Right. Makes them sound less important.

[COBY]:             

Yes.

[JAMES]:          

And so this whole rebranding, reframing of, well, let’s call them essential skills, well, that’s just window dressing on weak soft language, which doesn’t really do anything. Again, it’s too broad. Yes, I hate this language. These soft skills are widely used. They encompass a very diverse and wide ranging skill sets that are incredibly important. But we undervalue them often because we don’t have good language around the importance or how to define them.

[COBY]:             

Yes. Really what we’re getting at is that soft skills, what encompasses them, are really important. But the terms do them a great disservice. And I think one of the biggest disservices that they do is what you said the very beginning with technical skills, they’re really easy to kind of conceptualize and visualize well. The technical skills of baking are pretty clear in my mind during the job interview process, or very clear in my mind about what technical skills are needed for this person to get promoted or whatever it is. That’s very easy to think about. You can almost list them off top of your head, specific to the job where essential skills like, here’s the thing. I worked in workforce development for a long time. I’m a workforce specialist, and even as a workforce specialist, I have to memorize what the essential skills are because it’s not an intuitive term that I can conceptualize them easily or I have to really explain them to other people and justify them and defend them almost. So I think where we really want to go with this conversation is, I think we want to acknowledge this has been a problem for us as well as everyone else for a long time. We have a different way that we talk about soft skills and essential skills that has yielded a lot of success in our work in helping people conceptualize, visualize, understand, validate the skills that make up those terms. And I’m not saying that this should be the new language, but reframing the skills in this new way has helped us, and I’m hoping it’ll help you, the listener, in both your career aspirations, any future jobs, even how you think about developing yourself for leadership, and also.

[JAMES]:          

If you are looking at how do you develop others, right. This is not just a personal development language. This can be used for internal succession planning and training and development strategies.

[COBY]:             

Yeah. So the way that we talk about these soft essential skills is we refer to them as employability skills. What are the skills needed to be employable? And where this term has come from for us, it’s really kind of developed organically was when I was doing workforce development and working with individuals who were in transition, during career transition, and was trying to access the realities of the workforce and everything like that. One of the things that I did very early on that gave me a lot of success in working with organizations, funders, businesses, was I made a very clear distinction between job ready and employable, because we talk about even students coming right out of school. A lot of, again, organizations would think of those two things, job ready and employable, as synonyms, but they’re not. Job ready means that they have the ability to get a job. They have the free schedule, they might have the transportation, they have the ability to show up on their first day and show up consistently throughout.

[JAMES]:          

And the base level requirement to do the job.

[COBY]:             

And again, that’s important, right?

[JAMES]:          

Yeah.

[COBY]:             

But being able to show up and have the flexibility or the free openness of their schedule to go to work every day isn’t enough to actually be successful in their job. Employable was, do they have the skills needed to actually hold on to that job and to develop themselves in that job, be successful in that job? That’s about time management. That’s about the ability to be trained, that’s good communications, that’s the willingness to problem solve and all these kind of things like that. The things that they need to do in order to build connections, build competencies, be reliable, be independent, to accept responsibility, all of those things are what also have to exist. And the way that we always talked about it in that context was that technical skills are what will often get you the job, but employability skills are what will keep you in the job. And we could say they could learn, like, the students are a great example. Students right out of college would learn how to operate a piece of equipment, or learn how to be able to be an apprentice and know how to look under the hood or whatever it might be in trades. But if they don’t have the employability skills that will allow them to show up, do good work, be independent, be trainable, then those technical skills are kind of wasted if the person’s not employable.

[JAMES]:          

Yeah, and employability. The other piece to this conversation is that it’s not just at the beginning of your career when these skills are required, because you may be a technical expert in, I don’t care, whatever you are a technical expert in, whatever your depth of knowledge is. But if you’ve been in the workforce for really any amount of time, it will be pretty easy to recognize that it’s not just the technical experts, and oftentimes it’s not the person with the highest proficiency in the job that gets the promotion. It’s, do you have the ability to work with others? Are you a technical expert who can coach other people, who can train, who can lead, who can communicate effectively, who can collaborate? These employability skills or skills that make you more employable are not only essential at the beginning of your career, but if you want to progress beyond a technical expert and that career advancement, these are going to be critical to your success.

[COBY]:             

Absolutely. I mean, promotions tend to be something that they’re easier to achieve if those that have the power to give it to you can visualize you doing more than just the technical piece. Right. Because the idea is that it really is kind of the employability skills that define how good an employee someone is. One thing that we see working in HR is a lot of discipline, almost is rarely involved with their technical skills. Discipline situations are, I’m not going to say exclusively, but are largely, largely about employability skills. And this is the reality, is that not having those skills that make you employable are what often gets you into trouble. Now, again, the thing to keep in mind too, is the skills you need to be employable are different in every job. It’s like technical skills are different in every job. What makes you employable at an entry level job is probably about reliability, consistency, willingness to learn, that sort of thing. Whereas when you move up to kind of like middle management, then it might be about organization and time management and delegation, and the ability to kind of coach others. And then senior leadership might be more about innovation and collaboration. So the employability skills scale with the job. The same my technical skills do, which is why I like viewing things from employability. Because to me, employability skills seem, or skills that make you employable seem like an equal partner. Technical skills, whereas the way that we’ve always heard, like the hard and soft skills or technical and essential skills, it almost seems very one sided that the real skills are the hard skills or technical skills, and these are just the squishy ones that no one really understands but we think are important. But whereas employability to me gives it a bit more weight to it and more tangibility, it makes them more of an equal partner.

[JAMES]:          

Well, it gives it more definition. It takes it from this broad nebulous of everything that is not.    technical and everything else to technical and employability. It puts a fence around what we’re talking about, and it creates a bit more structure, which is what I think has been largely lacking. I agree with your statement that I like how you talked about it being scalable with your career. There are some skills that, regardless of where you are in your career, are going to be important. Your ability to communicate effectively, clearly, to be able to explain things, regardless of where you are in your career, that is going to be very important. Your ability to understand and work with others, to hold your tongue when you’re upset, which if you’ve been listening to this podcast for any period of time, you may notice, is something that I’m still developing. But whether you agree, what I want to say is that there are some things that are going to help you out regardless, and whether you agree it’s right or wrong, generally speaking, we want to work with people we like and we generally don’t like it when people don’t know how to communicate or are not effective in their communication, or they’re unclear every time that they talk to us, or they aren’t consistent in what they say to us, or when they don’t have that ability to follow through on what they’ve talked about, or they have no self awareness or ability to work with other people. Right. These are often traditionally thought as soft skills, but they are skills that will make you more employable. And we like to work with people we like. We like to promote people we like. Right or wrong, it’s not just the technical knowledge of the job that’s going to be enough.

[COBY]:             

Absolutely. So I think that what we should do is we should talk about the employability and technical kind of piece in kind of a few different areas to kind of also kind of show the depth and show it’s not just about living in one part of our careers throughout. So let’s jump in and actually talk about it in terms of kind of the most obvious, which is recruitment. Okay. So like I said before, technical skills may get you the job. It may be what your training and your experience might be, what gets you them excited about your application in the interview and maybe why they hire you. But it is rarely the technical skills that allow you to hold on to the job. And like I say, where most of the work that I did around workforce development in improving employability skills, really, again, once that distinction was made and that clarity was made and we’d look to improve how people were able to think critically, how they were able to problem solve, how they were able to manage their time and deal with adversity and be more assertive and those types of things and how they communicated and all those kinds of etiquette, those elements once kind of clearly defined, and we incorporated them into these programs that used to build and this work that we used to do, these projects that we had on the go had a profound effect because it was one of those things where when businesses were talking about wanting employees and having them be prepared for the job, they were still thinking job ready was good enough, just like government was, just like everybody else was. But once we really kind of drew the line, well, yeah, you want them to be able to have the ability to hold down a job, but you want someone that’s going to be employable, someone that you’re going to want to be there. And that different kind of like, again, separating something that we thought was a synonym into kind of very clear distinctions and saying both you need both really kind of is a profound effect, and I think it’s something that we should be looking at when we’re looking for a job, but also when we’re recruiting. Yeah.

[JAMES]:          

And I’ve been on the other side of it, working with, prior to past life type stuff, working with small businesses who are going through the recruitment process, who are trying to fill these positions and coaching them through what is actually required to perform the job duties. And how do you assess these? If I’m honest, at that time, whatever it was 15 years ago, not having the language of employability skills made it more difficult because many people know the importance of soft skills. And in the recruitment process, you do need to assess whether or not somebody has the requisite technical knowledge to perform the job. But rarely are you only looking at technical proficiency. Right. We’re always looking for somebody who is going to be able to work with the rest of the team, because if you bring in somebody who is a poison pill, who doesn’t know, who’s rarely is a lone wolf going to be the best choice to join an organization. Right. We want people who can work collaboratively. We want people who can communicate effectively. We want people who can problem solve and think critically, and all of these other employability skills. And so many times in past careers, I’ve seen businesses struggle to really define what it is that they’re looking for outside of the technical expertise. And I think this language of employability skills makes a significant difference.

[COBY]:             

Yeah. Because one thing was always funny when I was doing workforce projects was we’d have employers come and talk to us about kind of the stuff that they’re looking for. And it’d be funny because especially we were looking at kind of like things in trades or things or things that were more labor focused. They would really prioritize their technical skills and their experience in construction. Can they measure? Can they do this? Can they do that? But then the training that they would give once they were hired, a lot of it reinforced a lot of the stuff they asked for. Can you show up and can you swing a hammer? Were kind of like we often joke was kind of the bar they set. But then they’re like, well, you’ll spend the first two weeks learning how to swing a hammer. But it really was, they want to make sure they could show up that they were job ready, and then they were focused on the technical skills because they knew how to train for that. And a lot of the onboarding stuff or a lot of the new employee orientation was very technically focused. And there was the assumption that if they could show up, then the rest would be there. But again, using the language around skills that make you employable really kind of helps identify this gap that they were overlooking.

[JAMES]:          

And I think that’s a really important point, is that it is often easier to train somebody in the technical proficiencies required to perform a task. And yet, even though that’s the easier one to develop in a person, it’s still what we tend to prioritize. Even though if we found the person with the right employability skills, we could train that person to perform the technical aspects. Or that would be easier to train than bringing in somebody who has the technical aspect but does not have those key skills that make them employable.

[COBY]:             

Yeah, but you really want to make sure that, you know, kind of who the person is and how they’re going to be able to handle all of the nontechnical stuff, how are they going to handle conflicts, how are they going to handle deadlines, how are they going to handle problems that come up or handle independence, you know what I mean? And again, these are harder things to measure in the recruitment process, but they’re not impossible. But I think to summarize just the whole thing around recruitment for those of you that are looking for jobs, even though the company might not necessarily be asking for employability skills to be shown, they know what good employability looks like. So talking about reliability, talking about consistency, talking about good communications, talking about being able to work independently, collaboration, those kinds of things are always good things to make a good impression, whether or not they’re asking for it. But if you’re hiring for people, then you be kind of clear, what is your onboarding process focus on? Because if you’re really valuing technical skills and then your onboarding process reinforces technical skills, then are you kind of doubling up on something you’re already good at? Right. Whereas consider the fact that maybe you need to be really getting to the heart of their employability and then looking for how much technical skills do you require as a minimum standard and how much can you develop in them? Because like we said, those tend to be more if not easier. They’re certainly more common already provided, and.

[JAMES]:          

The specialized nature of the position is going to dictate a lot of that. Right? Like there’s no hard and fast rules here. It’s going to be different based on each position. One thing I heard this statement years ago, and it’s always stuck with me, and I find it very true, is that one problem with valuing experience above all else is that it’s very easy for somebody to have 20 years of experience, or do they actually have one year of experience 20 times? Right. The idea that just because a bum has been in a seat for an extended period of time. Yes. It’s usually a good indication that they may have the skills, but be very cautious of placing too much emphasis on that.

[COBY]:             

Yeah. Longevity doesn’t equal competency.

[JAMES]:          

Yeah. I mean, we’ve all know of people, worked with people, have seen people who have been a warm body in a chair for 10, 15, 30 years. But would we consider them technical experts because of that experience? I can think of a few who are not.

[COBY]:             

Absolutely. So let’s move on. Talking about talent development, because, again, the need for employability skills is kind of clear with recruitment, but in talent development, the skills that make you employable, we might be kind of bringing something really new to this conversation. And one of the areas I think that is really important to really kind of reframe your thoughts around employability skills, technical skills, is with succession planning. Because the idea of trying to kind of carve out what skills are needed or to have a clear plan or where do you have the internal promotion, what are the career ladders, career paths looking like? Those are pieces where usually the technical skills are kind of assumed because they’re in the company, they’re in the job. You can look back on what they did yesterday, but really, I think what defines their path and what defines the path that you need to plan for to succeed people is going to be heavily around employability. Is this person employable in this job? And that, I think, is kind of the core question we need to start asking when we look at things like succession planning.

[JAMES]:          

Yeah. And when we’re talking about succession planning, we’re not talking about organizational succession planning. We’re talking about the internal skills, the replacement of skills on a regular basis for your people, because sometimes there’s some confusion around because succession planning can mean passing it on to the next generation of business owner versus. That’s not what we’re talking about in this instance. We’re talking about. Really, do you have a plan for how you are going to replace those key positions, those key skill sets in your organization? Because what happens when that technical expert finds another job? What happens when that key manager receives another offer? Or, God forbid, what happens if somebody gets sick or injured? Right. We need to be planning for these things. And the way that you approach your internal succession planning really should have this strong employability mindset to it.

[COBY]:             

Yeah. Because, I mean, one thing that we often hear from people who are, let’s talk about really specialized positions just for a few minutes. Again, very high technical, high experience, usually very highly educated positions. And some people feel the problem with those jobs is they get stuck. Well, I’m the only one in the company that can do this or do that. So I can never get promoted because there is no plan to replace me. And that’s pretty common. Again, we do work in the manufacturing sector and stuff like that. And when it comes to specialized equipment or pieces like that, that is not.

[JAMES]:          

Around being able to maintain specialized equipment, that’s huge and incredibly valuable skill set that the company needs to maintain. But yeah, we’ve seen it with clients of people being pigeonholed and being passed over for advancement opportunities because they can’t feel like they can’t free this person up to go into another position because they need them in this very narrow focus.

[COBY]:             

Right. So this is where the importance of talking about employability skills can really add to the conversation. Because if that person were to be promoted, what skills would they need to be employable in that new position? And often it’s about, can that person pass on their technical knowledge to someone else? Can they create other specialists? And if those skills are developed in them, then you don’t just have a diamond, you have a way of making diamonds. And that’s a whole ballgame.

[JAMES]:          

It’s huge because it’s not just communication. It’s not just the ability to train others. It’s not just the ability to coach and to mentor. We have met so many people who have such a rich depth of knowledge in their field, but knowing how to do something and teaching someone else how to do something are two vastly different skill sets. I don’t mean this as harsh as it’s going to sound, but look at most university professors. I’ve had professors who are incredible technical experts who are there for research purposes, but being able to pass on the depth of their knowledge was not the highest priority in the job.

[COBY]:             

Yeah, but the idea of the technical expert needing to kind of develop their employability skills to not limit their career path reminds me of, I remember working with a large manufacturer and there was an engineer who talk about a unique skill set that was vital, and they protected this person, you wouldn’t believe, because if they got poached by somebody else, this company would be in trouble. But what was so cool about this particular engineer was that they were really easy going, they were really easy to talk to, they were really patient, they were really reliable, and they showed so much potential and promise that the company started to invest in their ability to coach and to train others, because they saw that this person had the natural inclination to be able to become not just a protective diamond, but to create more diamonds and be able to kind of have this more leadership responsibility. Because the job that the person did was dirty and grimy and not fun, and the person was young, so they didn’t mind doing it. But the company knew they weren’t going to be able to have rely on this person doing it forever, or if he gets injured, what are they going to do? But then realizing that if we invested in what skills would make them employable at the next level when we promote them, that was great planning around succession, and they realized that this person, we need to invest in what skills will make them employable to allow them to move up and have someone else kind of come in. Because again, there’s a lot of engineers that work there that were very technical, but they really had no desire or really didn’t have the employability skills to make that journey. This person did. And it’s important to realize that limiting your career path because of your technical skills will often be because of your lack of employability to the next job.

[JAMES]:          

And I mean, it’s really hard to understate this position that the gentleman fulfilled. The company had three locations, and there was one crucial piece of equipment that was fundamental to their entire operation, one at each of their locations. And this was the only person who actually knew how to maintain that equipment. It was incredibly niche, very specific understanding of a very unique, specific piece of equipment. And it’s tough to talk about these things without naming, but I really am impressed with the client in how they viewed this person and their development opportunities. Because we’ve seen so many instances of companies wanting to bubble wrap very specific skill sets. This company instead took a much longer view of what is going to be required for their long term organizational success. And relying on one person to maintain three pieces of equipment across three sites is very risky when that knowledge is very hard to replace.

[COBY]:             

Yeah, absolutely. And the thing, too is that because of this person, who a lot of their peers would hit a ceiling because of their technical expertise, this person, their career was almost given a much more potential because of their employability skills. Even though we talk about employability, people might automatically go to just about recruitment. It is really about internal succession is probably where the biggest area for improvement and the biggest area for use of this term would be.

[JAMES]:          

Yeah, well, there’s another use that we need to talk about as well. And that’s in leadership. Yes, I’ve seen this. It’s so prevalent in small business, whether you’re talking micro companies with five employees, small businesses with 50, or small businesses with 250. What usually happens is that a business is started by a technical expert. Somebody who is an excellent chef might open a restaurant. If they’re an excellent baker, they may open a bakery, a cafe. If they’re an engineer with technical knowledge and understanding. It could be drones or sensors or whatever. That’s often the catalyst for a new business. Forming is a technical understanding and expertise to create a product that other people need, want, and they can sell.

[COBY]:             

Right.

[JAMES]:          

As the business grows, that technical expertise of the founder becomes far less important.

[JAMES]:          

Sure, when you’re still at like five employees or even 50 employees, that’s really important. But I can think of a specific client that we’ve worked with that they were a group of five technical experts who founded a company right out of university. For all five of them, it was their first job, really, but they had such a depth of understanding of how to create the product that they were selling. And they’ve built the company. From the five of them to the time that we started talking with them, they were around 65, 75 employees and growing quite fast. But what was limiting their growth was not their technical understanding, it was their employability skills. Those five people would never be hired by an outside agency to run a company or to manage people because they were technical experts who got the job because they started the company. They really did not have the skills to make them employable in the realities of what is needed to take a company from 75 to 750 employees. And that is such a prevalent, such a common problem with small business leaders. At a certain point, your technical knowledge becomes far less important than your ability to lead, to manage, to communicate, to coach, to mentor, all of these skills that make you employable in the new realities of your job.

[COBY]:             

Yeah, and I think that that is an interesting point that people might want to really sit on, is that sometimes our senior leaders, our founders, the owners, do not have the skills to make them employable in their current jobs. And they have the job because it evolved because they formed the business, but they don’t have the skills to be successful in their own jobs, and someone else would not employ them to do that job because they don’t have the employability skills. And this is why, like, say, employability may make you think mostly, again, about recruitment, but this is kind of a cool question to ask yourself is about, does this person have the skills to be employable in their job, whether that’s entry level, frontline, or that’s owner. And the thing is that again, when the founder is the business, then technical skills tend to be enough. But as soon as you start to scale, then you might be in a situation where, unless that founder improves their ability to be employable in their new role, in their new job duties, in their new expectations responsibilities, they might not be employable in their current job. There’s no one to fire them.

[JAMES]:          

There’s no one to fire them. But people fire themselves. Right?

[COBY]:             

Exactly.

[JAMES]:          

Where it hits a breaking point is with high levels of turnover. Because if you have a depth of technical understanding and not the skills required to manage and lead and develop others, you’re probably going to get in the weeds just naturally. That’s where your thinking is focused. That’s probably where you’re going to place your emphasis, which means that you are going to be micromanaging or standing over the shoulder of other technical experts who you have hired.

[COBY]:             

Yeah, like a lot of business owners, listen to our podcast, and if you’re one of them, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to take a moment of reflection and be like, am I employable in the job that I have? Do I have the combination of employability skills and technical skills to perform my duties optimally, or am I resting on the skills, on the technical skills that got me to where I am and I haven’t expanded beyond that? Or at least I’ve not dedicated the time to get as good as I need to be at them by intentionally trying to develop those skills.

[JAMES]:          

And that’s key, because all is not lost if you are a technical. I don’t care what stage of career you’re at, whether you are looking for a job, whether you’re looking for a promotion, or whether you are the owner of a business with deep technical knowledge, you can develop these employability skills. Skills can be trained. They can be learned. They can be developed. They can be trained. It’s going to require self reflection to understand what you are actually missing, and it’s going to require effort to seek out the right resources to be able to fill in those gaps.

[COBY]:             

Yeah. So again, to kind of summarize, I think we’re getting close to the end of this conversation, but the idea that we need to reframe soft and essential skills to being about employability really are the skills required to be successful. Like technical skills, employability skills are what’s required to be successful. And it’s important for us to realize that employability kind of is important. If you’re a job seeker, an employee or a manager. So they’re really everybody and they’re not something that we can really, we really can’t undervalue them. And hopefully by finding a new way to talk about them, we’re going to be able to actually bring more tangibility to this conversation around. Skills required for success.

[JAMES]:          

Yeah, I think that’s the key for me is for so many years I’ve been so frustrated with the language of soft skill, and I find essential skill to just be irritating, but framing it from skills that are required to be employable or employability skills to make it easier, it puts a bit of a fence around what we’re talking about. It takes it from this broad nebulous of what are we actually saying here? To something tangible that we can actually evaluate.

[COBY]:             

Right. So I think I’ll do kind of a quick summary.

[JAMES]:          

Sure.

[COBY]:             

So what skills required to be successful? Well, really it’s about having the technical skills to deliver on the job duties of your position, but it also is about having the employability skills to be able to perform all of the duties beyond just the technical. There tends to be this overvaluing of technical skills because they’re easier to measure, easier to conceptualize, and easier to kind of understand or assume are present. And I think largely that’s been the case for over time because we’ve used terms like soft skills or essential skills in order to kind of be the partner to technical skills. But those terms have not been well received and really are too abstract and really underserve these crucial components to someone’s career and someone’s aptitude for a position. Maybe employability skills isn’t the perfect term, but we like how it is and how it really has a lot of value in recruitment because it allows you to realize, does this person have the skills to be employable in our company to do this job? Because again, technical skills may get you a position, but employability skills will allow you to keep it in talent development. When it comes to internal succession, technical skills may be what limits your ability to grow and skill in a company. Because if your technical skills are better than your employability skills, that may end up limiting your career. But if you can do the job, teach others, motivate others around you. Technical skills will not hold you back. And it comes to leadership. Many business owners have the technical skills and that’s why they started the business. But they may not technically be employable as a manager. And sometimes we have people who are leading companies, even fast growing companies, but they’re not employable in the position that they’re in because they haven’t prioritized developing those skills. And those skills are teachable. You can develop them, and it’s something that you have to one value these skills as an equal to the technical skills and be able to kind of get the outside help that will allow you to really invest in these crucial skills, because nobody wants to be in a position that they’re unemployable in. All right, so that about does it for us. For a full archive of the podcast and access to the video version hosted on our YouTube channel, visit www.roman3.ca/podcast thanks for joining us.

[ANNOUNCER]:              

For more information on topics like these, don’t forget to visit us at www.roman3.ca. Side effects of this podcast may include improved retention, high productivity, increased market share, employees breaking out in spontaneous dance, dry mouth, a version of the sound of James’ voice desire to find a better podcast…