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In this episode, Connie covers the fourth part of the five-part fluid career system, Networking. It’s all about creating that value exchange and building your village to help you reach your potential. She explains how it fits into the overall system and why it’s so critical to career success.

Transcript

Connie: So our very last component in our five parts system is building hard and soft skills to move your goals forward. So what do I mean by building your skills? What are hard and soft skills? All of us have skills that we need to develop and leverage to do our jobs, really to do what we do. Some are very specific in nature to the role to the industry or discipline while others are more universal.

So for example, those hard skills that we might need could be coding, project management, data analysis, email marketing, it's very specific to that role, or it could be very specific to an industry. What are the soft skills? Which tend to be more universal; communication, problem solving, leadership, empathy, having a growth mindset. You absolutely need both in order to build the business of you and it's necessary for you to identify which skills will be the most important for you to deliver against the plan that you've mapped out. And the ratio of what those skills are going to be are going to be different for everyone, but what I fully believe and what you do see out there based on whether you look at LinkedIn, whether you look at any analyst reports or any future trend research it's that soft skills really matter.

Now that we're in a fully digital world, your ability to connect with people and clearly convey what you're thinking, what you're feeling and guide people in this digital world is really necessary because these drive-bys, where you can go over to somebody's desk and chat with them and get the information you don't exist anymore.

Everything's on Slack or on email or whatever digital form of communication that you're using. So this ability to connect in a way that people can relate to you, can work with you, can help you move things forward is really necessary. In the creating your compass component, your strategic plan likely would have included skills that you need to acquire and build up.

Particularly if you're looking to pivot into something new. So in this particular section, it's really about verifying and updating the skills you need to achieve your goals and objectives, determine how you learn and even get them and implement and optimize those new talents that you've acquired.

How do you verify and update the skills? Well that starts with also some of the networking that you've done, you spotted the trends, you got some information there that created that foundation. But as you talk to people, they're going to let you know that you probably need to augment your skills with X, Y, and Z, whether it's hard or soft, but once you know what that is, there are a lot of different ways for you to build them, some would be through the traditional online courses, Coursera, Udemy, YouTube videos, and so forth. But the other piece is really practicing them. 

There's one thing for the hard skills, it's probably a bit easier to understand how to build that. Soft skills probably may feel more amorphous. So when it comes to soft skills, it's practicing in different situations on how to put yourself out there. When you build your skills it's not just the hard skills that you need to develop, but soft skills and specifically EQ matter even more. There is an interesting quote actually in Deloitte future work, which is the jobs of the future are expected to be more machine powered and data-driven than in the past, but they will also likely require human skills and areas such as problem solving, communication, listening, interpretation, and design. Those are all soft skills. And as I mentioned, one of those critically important soft skills is EQ, not just IQ.

That has an incredible impact on your professional success. In fact,it is the single biggest predictor of performance in the workplace, and it's the strongest driver of leadership and personal excellence. What EQ enables you to do is help you see and sense what's going on in any environment, and it enables you to establish and manage relationships more effectively.

So what is it composed of? It's really two dimensions, your personal competence, and this comes from actually emotional intelligence 2.0. Personal competence, which is self-awareness and self-management. Really knowing what's going on within you and actually managing ultimately your behavior, and then social competence, it's social awareness and relationship management.

So it's that external view, you sensing and feeling what's going on with others, how they're behaving, so that you can create the connection with them. It is the inward understanding of you, what you're feeling, what you're sensing and what you're behaving, and then the external component of how others are feeling and behaving and sensing all that to create the alignment on what you need to do next.

So how do you go about verifying those skills that you need to begin with? Or even maybe identifying new ones? A lot of that comes from your interactions that you're going to have with people who have that depth and breadth of knowledge that you're looking for to learn from in your networking phase.

And what's important to do when you meet with these different individuals, is ask them the question, ask them what do you feel are critical skills for someone like me to develop? And I want you to think pretty expansively about that, that to be able to, for example, maybe effectively move up to the next level.

Maybe one of your goals is to move from a more analysts level job to a management job. So leadership is really important. Leadership is a soft skill. What does it mean to be a great leader? How do I learn in that particular way? So one is really being able to network with those people who could give you insight.

The other piece is yes, you could look at online courses, some have them, but also look within your company because many companies, particularly larger ones, may have more formal training around leadership, conflict management, work style. Another important solution could be finding a mentor. Now your company may provide some mentorship opportunities and more formalized programs to find a match.

But if not, then as you network with people, maybe some of the people you meet will be open to that. Most really are willing to help and serve as that when you have a genuine connection, but if you ask them to be a mentor and they don't even know you, realize that probably isn't going to fly. Another way to think about building your skills, building these soft skills; podcasts.

I've learned myself about a lot of different topics by being able to listen to these amazing stories, you get the authentic voice and perspective of those in this medium. And I know that's been a very popular way that many have learned. Maybe you get a career coach, maybe you get a leadership coach.

That's another avenue. But one thing that could be also valuable is take a stretch assignment. So say you want to build that leadership skill. Maybe there's an assignment where you could lead a new project. You'll have some hard skills that you need to leverage, but the reality is that you’re going to have to learn to effectively communicate what the strategic initiative is, bring together everybody to be on the same page, and manage that throughout. So by doing a project, you're going to be able to build that leadership skill. So also think differently, not in a very narrow way where it's about just taking a course. Look at the breadth of solutions that are out there, where you can test and learn and see what sticks with you.

The key thing to remember is that the fastest way to hone these skills is just practice. You do it over and over again. It's going to feel uncomfortable when you start, but the more you do it, the more that you can understand nuances of things, particularly in understanding those soft skills, the more effective you're going to be.

Resources

• Connect with Connie on LinkedIn 

• Get Building the Business of You: A System to Align Passion and Potential Through Your Own Career Mashup

• Order the book on Amazon

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