Skills to Develop for Job Success Post-COVID-19

COVID-19 has turned the economy upside down, and countless businesses are closing in response to stay-at-home orders and social distancing guidelines. Currently, millions of people are unemployed across the country and are looking for their next job opportunity. The best way to get a leg up in any job search is to have desirable skills on your resume.

Below are both hard skills and soft skills that can help you boost your resume and find a high-paying job in a post-COVID-19 world.

Hard Skills to Learn in a Post-Coronavirus World:

• Web Development and Coding

When everyone started working remotely, the world needed a digital transformation and fast. Skills like web development and coding will help us build the digital infrastructure required to support a stay-at-home world. With the right skills, you can help keep digital businesses smoothly running during and after the crisis — a fundamental goal to keep the economy going.

There is a variety of web design and coding courses at Coursera.

• Data Analysis and Literacy

Another tech-aligned skill set, data analysis, and literacy can help companies understand their clientele better and what is motivating the market to act the way it is. Understanding the data behind actions, disruptions, and decisions can help a floundering business start thriving in the post-COVID-19 world.

Data analysis is the “process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions and supporting decision-making.”

You can find professional data analysis courses online at edX, which offers professional certificate programs through HarvardX, IBM, Microsoft, and others.

• Marketing

Quality marketing skills or experience can make you a highly desirable candidate when searching for employment, especially during the pandemic. Every company is looking for the best ways to advertise its products and services while staying compassionate to the ongoing situation.

Marketing doesn’t require a marketing degree — you can get a job through self-study and having a clear understanding of basic marketing practices. It would help if you also were an innovator who comes up with fresh ideas and new ways to get the company’s message in front of its target audience.

You can learn the necessary marketing skills at LinkedIn Learning.

Soft Skills to Develop in a Post-Coronavirus World:

• Leadership

Leadership is more important now than ever. Without strong leaders ready to do both what is needed and necessary, companies will continue to shutter everywhere. Every business needs a strong leader at the helm during the ongoing crisis — one who can steer the company in the right direction to avoid closure, failure, and floundering.

Leadership skills are not always easy to come by and require hours of study and learning. Even after that, not everyone is cut out to become a leader. However, you can start by reading professional self-help books and trying online courses like those at Learn@Forbes, which offers eight courses in leadership essentials with a 14-day free trial.

• Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is vital as the world moves beyond the current pandemic. Both leaders and non, need critical thinking to understand that state of the world and find the best way to move forward. In particular, the global economy will need critical thinkers to rebuild and grow following any COVID-19-related recession, however significant.

Critical thinking is “the analysis of facts to form a judgment.” Further, “critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking.” Employees who can use critical thinking to successfully solve a problem or learn information from a variety of sources and see the truth of the matter are highly valuable in a post-coronavirus world.

You can find courses on how to develop critical thinking skills at Coursera.

• Innovation

Innovation is “viewed as the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs, or existing market needs.”

Innovation is a valuable skill for rebuilding businesses and the economy. Without innovation, we cannot adapt to our new economic landscape. The companies that successfully adapted to working mostly online or found new ways to provide products and services to customers stuck at home are doing better during the pandemic. Innovative ideas are solutions to some of our most plaguing problems post-coronavirus.

There are tons of innovation courses listed on edX.