Curiosity. An up-and-coming skill and key to career success
What new skills can improve your future job prospects?
Experts increasingly talk about the bright future of “hybrid professionals”, i.e. those with a combination of IT and humanist knowledge and outlooks. Individuals and teams that create effective synergies between the digital and traditional worlds and more able to make a contribution today and tomorrow.
The ability to learn quickly and look ahead, have a digital outlook, manage ambiguity, analyse data and be an inspiring storyteller are all skills in which curiosity is a mainstay: an “emerging skill” in today’s digital world brimming with data, uncertainty and face-paced change.
Only 6% of employees are well prepared to solve rather complex problems in cutting-edge technological environments
These multi-facetted professionals feature a combination of rare, highly sought-after professional skills. According to the Davos Forum, only 6% of employees are well prepared to solve rather complex problems in cutting-edge technological environments.
Although curiosity may look like a niche skill only necessary for experts, it will be more essential and transversal in an increasingly sophisticated, ambiguous and technological future.
One major challenge facing the education of young people and the career development of adult employees is how to make curiosity – a “rara avis” today – more commonplace in job descriptions in a few years.
Curious people tend to find out about other people, learn new things, think outside the box, and look into rare or original things of interest
Curious people tend to find out about other people, learn new things, think outside the box, and look into rare or original things of interest: essential qualities in settings that need creativity and on-going innovation and the ability to venture beyond traditional industry boundaries where strategies are often “dangerously” alike.
Well directed curiosity has many benefits at work and in life in general. It strengthens personal and professional links, helps reduce anxiety, has a positive impact on levels of happiness, fosters learning, helps control necessary risk taking, protects the brain from aging and Alzheimer’s, and helps achieve life goals.
Making the most of your current business and exploring new opportunities are two ways of ensuring your long-term business sustainability. In today’s fast-moving world, the majority of competitive edges crumble like sandcastles by the sea.
In conjunction with other skills and knowledge, curiosity helps find solutions
In conjunction with other skills and knowledge, curiosity helps find solutions such as rebuilding your positioning, reinventing your business, boosting your team’s talent and results, creating synergies with external partners and more, always with a view to advancing decisively towards the future and overcoming natural doubts and fears with greater criteria.
Curiosity, enthusiasm, empathy and critical thinking: skills that contribute to career success and, above all, to a more genuine, meaningful life.
These highly human traits improve our job prospects and, in the short term at least, cannot be reproduced by robots. It remains to be seen how the curiosity and emotional intelligence of our robot colleagues develops in coming years…