Businesses of all sizes and stripes need a wide range of skills to operate effectively.
From your HR team through to sales and marketing, and the finance teams that ensure you’re turning a profit, there are so many areas of specialization that your team requires to find success.
In this article, you’ll learn about the six critical skills you should invest in to help drive your business’ success. Read on to learn what skills appear to be most important for modern businesses to stay competitive in the 2020s.
Coding and Web Design
When it comes down to it, we need to recognize the utmost importance of coding and digital skills in the modern economy. With many of the world’s largest businesses conducted solely online, and much of the development in modern business also taking place in digital, internet-based technologies, these skills are utterly essential for modern businesses on the rise.
Look out specifically for those coders who have experience working across different platforms and companies, and find workers who have just graduated from university courses. It’s this latter group who will be malleable to your business needs, and able to apply their skills to your requirements.
Data Analysis
Data is frequently referenced as the ‘new oil’, which means that it’s a resource that the whole world’s economy is slowly being based around. Companies like data: it’s easy to understand, and it’s objective.
That means that companies can make smart decisions from the insights that data has to offer. But to get to that position, they need a data analyst to help them uncover the secrets within their internal data. Aston University offers a fantastic data analysis master’s program, which can be taken online, to help an existing staff member manage your data more effectively.
Meanwhile, you may wish to find graduates from such programs to hire into your team, bringing in the talent you need to read your data more wisely in the future.
Creative Skills
If you’ve been listening to the clamour of human resources department and company bosses in recent years, you’ll have heard a sentiment repeated again and again across the airwaves: “We need creatives”. Creative people aren’t simply artists, novelists, and painters – they’re also those who can apply a unique way of thinking to your business, solving problems with outside-the-box logic.
These individuals are increasingly seen as a kind of Holy Grail in terms of their use within companies – and so you should prioritize such individuals to help bring new perspectives and skills to the table when you’re looking to update your team in 2020.
Digital Marketing
With more adverts placed on the internet than on television and radio combined, it’s truly a time for the digital advert and the digital marketer. With so much still to be developed in this vast field, and AI starting to be introduced to how we show consumers advertisements online, this is the time to invite marketing skills into your core team.
Digital marketers are excellent at the small things – like SEO optimization and keywords – but also at the larger picture, like the ongoing strategy, tone, and brand voice that you’re developing in-house. Hire experienced marketers into your team to get the cream of the crop when it comes to creatives who are focused on getting more customers involved with your brand.
Strategists and Analysts
When a company grows, it’s often the case that the senior management team begins to feel a little stretched. With only a handful of people at the very top, and your business scaling to hire dozens if not hundreds of employees, you may find that you lack in the strategic, long-term vision that you need to guide your evolving business forward.
That’s why hiring a strategist or an analyst to your business can be so useful at this stage in your lifecycle. Such an individual will have experience working in different businesses and will provide excellent assistance to your core team in all that they do.
Youth and Energy
Much is made of the younger generation in the media – and disparaging comments about avocados seem like the ‘new normal’ when considering Gen Z. And yet, this is a group in society that has grown up with nothing other than digital technology around them.
They’re ‘digital natives’ – which means that they are well-accustomed to the digital world and its trends and demands. If you’re able to hire individuals from this demographic, you’ll be able to guide your business towards profitable new areas of trade, harnessing the knowledge of youthful energy.
These six skills are all crucial if your business is to enjoy ongoing success in the future.
