As the old order of things continues to be upset by the economic and social turmoil that greeted the 2020s, job hiring in the Philippines has continued, albeit in different areas and industries from the past decade. In this post, we’ll discuss some of the most important job skills you should acquire, in order to get hired.
Even with this upheaval, a few things are unlikely to change. Whatever your industry, whether you have a Ph.D. or are still in high school, it’s key to understand that a lot of the most important job skills you will use in your professional life are probably not going to be things you learned in a classroom. Indeed, even as trends, techniques, and technologies come and go, we need to keep brushing up on these basic skills as much or more than the things we learned in school.
If you’re on the hunt for a new job, it naturally pays to take some time to reassess how rusty your technical skills are. However, we’d argue that the non-technical skills are what matters the most for snagging a prime opening and staying in it. Below are a few timeless job skills that will help you get hired and succeed in any industry.
5 Important Job Skills You Should Acquire:
1) Communication
Regardless of your field, you must be able to communicate not just with other people in your department, but those outside of it as well. Let go of your tendencies to use jargon if you have them and try to learn how to explain concepts that you know in a way that regular people will understand.
This will be a good skill to learn not just for explaining your job to friends and relatives, but for explaining your qualifications to a hiring manager.
To be blunt, no one who applies knowledge for a living is impressed by jargon. We also have to remember that a lot of concepts in many fields go by different terms and jargon. If you use jargon during a job interview, you can easily run the risk of the hiring manager not understanding what it was that you were trying to say.
Hiring managers may work with the person who will be your direct supervisor, but it’s possible that they don’t understand the field you are in. By explaining your qualifications in a way that regular people can understand, you can significantly improve the odds of being hired. For more about the importance of communication skills – read this post.
2) Negotiation
It goes without saying that you’ll need at least basic negotiation and persuasion skills just to get called back. If you’ve honed your ability to negotiate and persuade people, you’ll find many doors opened to you. It’s not just something that helps with the initial hiring process either. Knowing how to persuade people directly helps a career in management or sales as well.
Even in technical fields, persuasiveness goes a long way. If you will be talking to different people from different walks of life or even different internal departments, the ability to negotiate and create win-win situations will have you singled out as a leader and an excellent investment for any organization.
3) Awareness and empathy
While not to the same degree as it is in other Asian cultures, Filipino culture is highly-based on unspoken contextual cues. Awareness and an ability to understand what someone feels or thinks even when they aren’t saying things can prove decisive in any number of situations involving colleagues, customers, and other stakeholders in an organization. Being able to show the hiring manager that they don’t have to be so explicit all the time can be a game-changer when it comes to upping the odds of you getting hired. For more about this, read our article about people skills.
4) Confidence
Despite what some might think, confidence is a skill, just like anything else. And it’s never too late to learn how to be more commanding and assertive in your interactions. Being more confident is something that can’t be covered in a single article or even a whole book.
Also, everyone’s path to confidence will be different. However, regardless of how you get there, a dash of it is a surefire way for your application to be more remembered.
5) Perseverance
To me, this is the No. 1 of any list of important job skills. Contrary to what many self-help books will tell you, you can do everything right and still lose. That is completely OK and it is especially relevant when job hunting. Persistence and continuing the pursuit despite all difficulties is the ultimate key. And this is true for job hunting, succeeding in the job, in Business, or in anything you do.
Hiring decisions are not always rational or ethical. Indeed, they are often based on the gut feel and biases of the hiring managers and business owners. While there is plenty to be done to control how people perceive you, at the end of the day the decision is theirs.
Likewise, the decision of whether or not you will try again is yours as well. Thankfully, the Philippine job market has proven incredibly resilient to the cataclysmic events that have defined the dawn of the 2020s. You can and will succeed at landing the job you want eventually, but only if you keep trying.
Of course, perseverance is not everything. Learning to play it smart will also help you succeed at snagging a job sooner, rather than later.
Conclusion
Expertise in certain fields and technologies has a finite shelf life — a lot of the things that make you hireable today will not be so compelling in 10 or even 5 years. This is why, regardless of where you are in your career, it’s important to keep yourself sharp and up-to-date, not just with different developments in your field but with the timeless skills every organization needs. Good luck with your job hunt!
Want to read more of our business tips posts? Check out our post about online jobs at home and if you should do it or not, or the reasons why you should get a business analytics degree. You can also check our latest tips on getting to work at Subway.
