AI and automation is on the rise. People are worried they'll be replaced by machines who can think and do as we do. In my last article, I covered the top five skills that people need to cultivate in order to ensure they still have a job in the future.
These skills are important for us to stay relevant. Running away in the age of AI is not going to help. We need to have resilience. We need to take on challenges, embrace them, and understand how we can work with AI. If you haven't tried out any AI programs, go and try them. See what they do well. Understand how the AI works. But more importantly, recognise its limitation and therefore, see where you can provide value.
People who are resilient and resourceful will be able to do this better than others. These types of people are more likely to have a job alongside robots, than those people that don't have resilience. So how do you build resilience?
How to build resilience
If you don't remember the top five skills needed for the future of work, double check the last article I wrote on the future of work.
Building resilience alongside these skills will help to future-proof your career. Resilience means we can overcome challenges and setbacks. It means we can withstand the trials presented to us, and is the key to adapting.
There are a few things I believe builds resilience and cultivates the soft skills required for you to work effectively in the future. These are:
- Hackathons
- Teamwork
- Hiking
- Curiosity
- Learning
Let's look at each one.
Hackathons
Being known as the Hackathon Queen®™, I'm always going to mention hackathons. These are a great way to learn and practice many of the key soft skills. Hackathons are innovation events where participants are presented with a problem, and they develop a solution to that problem.
Creativity is key to a hackathon; building creative solutions to complex problems. Having good collaboration skills and persuasion means you'll be a fantastic team player. Hackathon solutions—like startups—will go through many iterations and solutions will change probably several times over the course of the hackathon. This means you'll need to adapt to new information. You'll also need emotional intelligence to understand to put aside your thoughts and feelings about a particular idea and do what's best for the team.
If you haven't been to a hackathon, I highly recommend it. Not only will you cultivate these soft skills, but you'll also have the chance to learn hard skills, network with industry professionals, and build out your resume.
Teamwork
We all know good teamwork is key to success. Why then do so many of us shun away from it? Group projects were certainly a thing to avoid when I went to university. I loved them, but many of my classmates would deliberately avoid subjects that included group coursework. They said group projects were the bane of any college student; your marks are at the mercy of your teammates, there's always that one kid in the group who doesn't do any work, but still gets the same score as everyone else, you are the one that ends up doing all the work, no one can decide on the project because everyone wants to work on their idea. Sound familiar?
This kind of thinking is exactly the kind of thinking that startups and success companies try to overcome. This type of thinking limits the potential of your business, it locks people into silos, and not everyone has a voice. The products and services delivered by companies that don't have good collaboration are limited to those customers who think and act like you. But we all know there are many ways of thinking in the world.
Good teamwork means everyone's voices are heard, products are well rounded, clients are happy. When you're working alone, you have just that, YOU. When you're working with others, you can draw on the collective knowledge and experiences of each other. Effective teamwork utilises the skills of each individual. When I talk about good teamwork, I'm also not just talking about teamwork with other humans. In our new era of work, we'll be required to work with robots. We are already relying on machines to keep our calendars, send us reminders, scan our code, and so much more. As machines develop, they'll become capable of more, and we'll need to learn to work with them if we are to survive in the workplace.
Hiking
I say hiking knowing this isn't something everyone is able to do. Whether through accessibility, financial constraints, or other commitments. If that's the case, find something else that works for you. The reason I love hiking is because it's such a great way to build resilience, adaptability, and emotional intelligence. When hiking, lots of things can go wrong. The weather can turn, you might get lost, it's hard going, and you might encounter lots of physical discomforts. It's exactly these things that help build resilience, adaptability, and emotional intelligence.
You need to adapt to situations, make decisions in an instant, and have the perseverance to continue on. You'll need motivation to get you through the tough parts and out the other side. Emotional intelligence is required for you to recognise that others in the group might be experiencing it harder than you. Our human ability to put aside our own feelings and physical hurts to help others is key to establishing resilience and adaptability.
So go hiking if you can. It's such a beautiful way to build up key skills, disconnect from our daily lives, immerse ourselves in nature, and experience some spectacular scenery along the way. If you can't go hiking for whatever reason, find something else that puts you in situations that I've described here. So often we try to escape things that make us feel uncomfortable, or if it's "too hard", to simply not do it. However, this kind of thinking doesn't help build resilience, and if we're stuck in this mindset, it will be a lot harder to adapt to the changes that are inevitably coming.
Curiosity
One of the things that sets humans aside from machines, is our ability to ask "why". Why is something done a certain way? Can it be done better? These are questions you should be asking each day. Don't just do something because it's the 'done' thing. Question the process, question the results. Why is something the way it is, or maybe it's not the way it seems?
Our ability to question reality will make us highly valuable in the new age of automation. Computers spit out knowledge, numbers, and results. We need to question how those results came to be, how they can be effectively presented to drive agendas, and what comes next.
Having a curious mind will set you apart from the rest. Curiosity also leads to learning.
Learning
Always Be Learning! This is something I learned early on. Education doesn't stop when you finish primary school, high school, or even university. It's something we continuously do, day after day. Learn from your peers, friends, family, those around you. Don't for a second think of learning as only academic knowledge. Learning life skills, different ways of thinking, soft skills, and hobbies. Don't ever think that you're "too good" to learn, or that you "know it all". Even leaders and experts in the field are constantly in the pursuit of knowledge.
You should make it a goal to learn at least one new thing each day. Even if it is something small, the acquisition of knowledge is vital to our professional and personal development.
Don't let the robots take over
Yes the robots are here, but don't let them take over. Harness your human ability. Cultivate it. Learn from the world around you. If you take the time to develop and foster soft skills you will be a highly valued teammate for the future of work.
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