7 Top Skills You Must Develop To Achieve Vocational Excellence
Achieving good grades and being well skilled in your area of specialization is highly recommendable, but cannot single-handedly usher you into the realm of vocational excellence.
There are other skills, mostly soft skills, which when developed in collaboration with your professional skills, give you the most competitive advantage you will ever need in the labour market. Our article titled "Soft Skills: Your sure way to beat the competition" gives you more insight into why those skills we're about to discuss here are among the major drivers of vocational excellence in the labour market.
In this article, we are going to discuss 7 top skills you must develop to achieve vocational excellence in the labour market.
1. Management skills:
One of the essences of higher education is to acquire higher-level technical skills that will help you manage and supervise specific tasks. But to be efficient in management, you need something more than higher knowledge in technical skills. You need soft skills also referred to as people skills in order to manage others.
A well-developed managerial skill demands that you communicate efficiently with others, have efficient leadership skills and have sufficient emotional intelligence. All these skills mentioned to be necessary for management skills are among the core soft skills needed in the labour market. Therefore if you desire excellence in your vocation, you must be good at managing people and tasks.
2. Customer service skills:
Customer service can either be a type of job or a set of skills. But in either case, the major focus is on addressing the needs of others and making sure they have a good experience from the process. To develop this skill, selflessness and humility is highly important.
You must get rid of the ego, because your focus should be on others and not on yourself. The essence of higher education is not to feel superior, but to acquire higher skills that will help you serve others better. The ability to operate on well-developed soft skills is the true mark of higher education.
To be customer-oriented is to think first about how others will benefit from their interactions with you and not the other way round. To be practically active in customer service skills you must be able to understand others' emotional cues and act accordingly.
When your customer service skill is developed, your clients, customers, colleagues, or even your employer will always feel better interacting with you. Knowing how to make others feel important and valued while addressing their need is very essential for your success in the labour market.
3. Time Management Skills:
How good are you with time management? How good are you with prioritizing your tasks? Time management is not just essential in your vocation, but a must if you want to live an orderly life.
If the technical skills you are acquiring today from school make up a smaller percentage of the overall skills needed for your success in the labour market, then your ability to allocate appropriate time to both hard and soft skills acquisition while in school is a prerequisite to your vocational excellence after school.
The ability to set your priorities right in all your endeavours cannot be overemphasized. Knowing what to do in the morning, what to do in the afternoon and what to postpone till tomorrow is the true nuggets of time management and an essential soft skill in your career pursuit.
4. Leadership skills:
A skill of leadership is simply a skill of influence. Leadership in the real sense of it is not a position, it is your ability to influence others in the right direction. If you can set a goal and carry others along with you in order to achieve that goal, you are a leader.
To assume leadership in the labour market, you will, first of all, become a person of integrity. Integrity yields trustworthiness, which is the major component of leadership skills in the labour market. If people can trust you, they will follow you.
If your customers or clients can trust you, they will always like to patronize you. If your employer can trust you, she will find it easier to hand over some of the affairs of the company to your care. Trust ushers you into leadership, while leadership positions you for opportunities in the labour market.
Though our article "Trust: The most viable currency in business" explains the viability of trust in business, but the principle behind the article also applies to every other profession. That's why soft skills can be said to be generic or transferable in nature because once developed, they can be applied to every other field of operation.
Another leadership component that can help you excel in the labour market is your ability to teach and mentor others. If you can take the initiative to teach and mentor junior staff at your workplace, management will take notice and reward you for that, which might include a rapid promotion.
As a student, one of the ways you can develop your leadership skills is through peer mentoring. Peer mentoring is your ability to engage a fellow student, teach and mentor her in order to benefit from the things you know as a more experienced student.
Our blog article titled "Peer mentoring: Unleashing the leader in you" explains more on how students can develop this skill of leadership as it applies in the labour market through peer mentoring.
5. Interpersonal Skills:
Interpersonal skills are vital soft skills that determine how efficiently you can connect with like-minded professionals in your area of expertise. If iron sharpens iron, then your professional network is at the helm of your vocational excellence.
The ability to connect and establish professional relationships goes a long way in determining how successful you can be in the labour market, and your interpersonal skills are the building blocks of this vocational virtue. Teamwork as vital as it is in the labour market cannot be properly harnessed without interpersonal skills.
If truly your network is your net worth, then you need to start developing your interpersonal skills as soon as you can.
After school, you will soon understand that it's not just about what you know, but more also who you know.
It's very important that you start making the right moves in developing this skill starting now you're still in school.
To gain real-time experience on interpersonal skills as it applies in the labour market through our stock management internship, click HERE to apply.
6. Communication skills:
Communication skills are the skills that help you communicate efficiently with others both verbally and non verbally. To develop this skill, you must first make sure you are working in an environment where you speak and understand the official working language efficiently. This is because it's only the language you efficiently understand that you can improve your skills of communicating with it.
Now, that your communication is based on the language that you fully understand, in order to become a better communicator, you must be very focused and active in listening, in order to comprehend the information being passed in its entirety.
Your ability to communicate clearly and confidently in the right words in such a way that other's emotions are being respected can open doors of opportunities for you in the labour market.
That's the essence of applying emotional intelligence in your communication. Being skillful in communication is a vital skill that can be very detrimental to overlook in this age of information technology.
7. Problem-solving Skills:
Problem-solving skills are vital soft skills that can help you survive the storms in the labour market. Problems will always be here with us, but the ability to handle them is what determines how successful you will be in life.
Likewise, in your vocation, your ability to pay attention to details, apply initiative and creativity in coming up with the right solutions is highly paramount to your success in this era of artificial intelligence.
Though the internet, computers, and the knowledge of artificial intelligence can be very helpful in solving our daily problems in the labour market, our ability to creatively use initiative in knowing how, when, and where to apply those technical skills for problem-solving is what separates the successful ones from the unsuccessful ones in the labour market.
To develop your problem-solving skills, as it applies in the labour market, start engaging with internships today. To learn more about the value of internships as a prerequisite to your success in the labour market, read our article "The power of internships".
To gain real-time experience on vital soft skills as it applies to the labour market, through our internship program, then click HERE to apply.
