Recently I had the pleasure of spending time with some postdocs from my old university, helping those of them considering leaving academia to prepare for job interviews and generally think about how they can position themselves for success in their future careers. The conversation got around to the core skills that everyone should develop, and they expressed some surprise at the things I pulled out - the same reactions I've had from software engineers when having the same conversation - so I thought it worth writing them down. In no particular order, these are they.
Writing
Like it or not, we end up writing a lot and I've found this only gets more true with seniority. Whether it is the ever-growing mountains of email, papers laying out a plan or strategy, or presentations we're going to be writing something down and we need to be both good at it and fluent enough to knock out quality documents at speed. The brutal truth is that people will judge you if your writing is incoherent and / or full of spelling and grammatical mistakes - developing a writing style is one of many tiny ways we can position ourselves as competent and helpful.
Writing at speed is key. Workloads just keep growing and, assuming you want to stay ahead, you'll need to move "writing a strategic document" from the sort of task where you put aside a month of thinking time to something you just do between other work. In more detail, that means having a writing process (and being able to deal with a blank page) and getting a feel for what "good enough" looks like for the different types of docs. This only comes from experience so I always recommend practising writing to everyone, whatever career stage they are in. I write this blog and I've kept a one-post-per-month routine since 2016 as a discipline to force me to keep writing and thinking about how I lay out my thoughts. Is it annoying? Yes, of course. But, while there is definitely much room for improvement, I feel much more confident writing quickly these days. In fact, I wrote a post about why I write a blog a few years ago.
Presenting
Second in the list of skills people don't want to develop but really should, we have presenting. Presenting comes in two forms - putting forward an idea to a room full of people (ie some variation of speaking to a PowerPoint) and something more freeform (ie speaking off the cuff to a room of people). These are different skills and both need practising. You will, at some point, need to present and ideally the first time you do this you aren't trying to secure funding from the investment board or explaining to the trustees / shareholders your five year vision. Like any skill, this takes practise to improve.
Earlier in my career I ran a fortnightly Show & Tell event which was a low-stakes way of getting people to do presentations and we all learned a great deal of confidence and technique through this. Again, I wrote a post on why Show & Tell really helped some years ago and I stand by all of that.
Talking off the cuff can be harder to practise, but when you end up chairing meetings or just the most senior person in the room you can be sure people will look to you to fill time when other people are setting up. Ideally we learn to stop using crutch or filler words and then we just sound ... smooth? I gained experience by chairing Show & Tell for many years - I think there is a useful lesson there about forcing oneself out of the comfort zone to develop new skills.
Storytelling
This one underpins both writing and presenting. When we reach out to people, we are usually either conveying information or attempting to persuade them of something. In either case we, presumably, want them to listen and understand what we are saying so we need to learn how to be compelling. We need to be able to tell a sensible, well-structured story understanding our audience and how to reach them. This is a hard skill to develop and really only comes through practising the above, and getting feedback. Alternatively, you could run some Dungeons & Dragons. Seriously!
Reading
Rather obviously, if we want to get on we need to be able to read. However, less obviously, as one climbs the hierarchy the amount of reading just goes up and up. Whether it's board papers, strategy documents or yet more email the torrent never ends and I've found that the more senior I get, the more people think that long = good. Reading fast and accurately is a skill that like everything else needs developing. Of everything on here, I find this one hardest. I find focusing on piles of tedious papers next to impossible so I have had to develop various skills to take a run at it. For me, I find the best approach to maintain focus is to take notes - or ideally annotate the papers. I've been using a Remarkable as an alternative to unending printing. I need a semi-controlled environment, with no alerts or distractions and some appropriate music and if these are updates I need to add a narrative to make me lock into the information - ie ask and answer "why am I reading this?" beyond "because I have to".
You can also ask an appropriate AI to summarise papers but don't come to me the first time it gets it completely wrong.
Basic numeracy
Believe it or not, numbers are important. Sorry. Far too many people haven't developed basic mental arithmetic skills and this creates situations where they are pulling out calculators to add two numbers together. While this is slow, and burns time you likely don't have, there is a more important aspect to basic numeracy. We all need a basic feel for numbers to be able to spot mistakes in budgets or other detailed documents. We need to be able to see 143 x 6 = 1200 and immediately get that mental nudge that says something isn't right even if we don't know what "right" is.
Again, practice makes perfect. I typically add up my shopping as I walk around the supermarket and see how close I am when I scan at the till - this helps keep me fluent at juggling numbers in my head. As a child I learned my multiplication tables and some of the simple tricks for approximating sums. For example, here 143 is approx 150, and that multiplies easily so in my head I go 143x6 => 150x6 => 300x3 = 900 so I'm expecting something a bit under 900. Thus 1200 is immediately a warning bell that someone has math'd wrong or something isn't right in the spreadsheet formulae. I cannot stress enough how many budget errors I've caught this way.
Using your tools - Word / Excel
Computers are a pain, but they are an essential pain. Do we know how to use PowerPoint? Or Word? Do we know when we should be using each tool? Similarly, learn the keyboard shortcuts. They help so much, both within an application and also when moving information between them. Don't forget Excel - and learn to use simple formulae for managing data. If it helps, using formulae will make maths mistakes less likely!
There is an even more basic computer skill. Can we type fast and accurately - and ideally touch-type? There are "proper" ways to touch-type and ways to learn these techniques, however personally I learned to type via brute force playing online games in the late '90s where you communicated by text and either typed fast or stayed silent. This is no longer an option, so instead get writing those blog posts (from "writing" above).
If you're in Tech you're likely thinking this section is really easy buuuut I know a lot of software engineers who stick to code and don't really develop these basic skills then find themselves very slow when asked to do "normal" things.
These days I will argue that getting familiar with AI and interacting with a prompt in something like ChatGPT is also a core skill. This is more vague, and your workplace will no doubt have policies around this, but like learning Excel / Word / PowerPoint it comes down to having some idea of the capabilities of your fingertips.
Interview technique
Everyone sane hates interviews. I'll be honest, I hate being on the other side of the table too. However, we all need to learn the basics of interviews. Learn what a competency question is and the mystic secrets of STAR answers and we have a framework for preparing for an interview. Then we learn to talk off the cuff and learn to tell a story (both above!) and we can fill in the gaps. Then get a job you like so you don't have to do them very often...
And lo, this is my list of the absolute basics. When I go through this list with people, most folk start with "yeah that's really obvious" then some slow enlightenment dawns as we drill in to each point. There are specific skills here, and we need to develop them with some deliberate action. There are also books on most of these areas (while I list these as "basic" I'm well aware that they all have the potential to be incredibly skilled and I don't mean to diminish the experts in these spaces) and there are certainly a couple missing (eg basic design - that is making your presentations / documents look not-horrible). I also skipped anything about basic time management or leadership skills as, for me, these are beyond the absolute basics. In my experience, we all neglect at least one (and likely many) of these areas and this will create issues. So I encourage everyone to deliberately practice writing, speaking, reading, telling a story, counting, computering and interviewing. It's an incredibly basic list, and that is why we often don't think about them.
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