Career Skills You Need to Master in 2019 May Surprise You

Soft work skills like creativity and adaptability are most worth learning in 2019, LinkedIn research shows.

No doubt your professional development is top of mind as you look at your goals for 2019. What new skills should you learn or hone? According to data from LinkedIn, the “skills most worth learning in 2019” include soft skills like creativity and adaptability. In fact, 57 percent of leaders told LinkedIn that soft skills are more important than hard skills in today’s ever-changing business environment.

These are the top five soft skills that companies are looking for most in 2019, according to LinkedIn.

• Creativity: Robots may be great at optimizing old ideas, but creative employees are needed to come up with the solutions of the future.
• Persuasion: No matter how great the product, platform, or idea, people have to be persuaded to buy into it.
• Collaboration: Effective collaboration is seen as key as projects grow increasingly more complex and global.
• Adaptability: Today’s constant change makes an adaptable mind an essential tool.
• Time Management: LinkedIn calls time management “a timeless skill,” and one that “will serve you the rest of your career.”

The soft skills on LinkedIn’s list represent a change in employer priorities, according to LinkedIn Learning Editor Paul Petrone.

“Interestingly, the newcomers to our list were uniquely human traits: Among soft skills, creativity and adaptability joined the list for the first time,” Petrone told CNBC Make It. “The emergence of … new skills suggests that employers recognize the importance of embracing modern technologies as well as recognizing those things technology can’t do.”

LinkedIn Learning instructor Stefan Mumaw suggests that if you must choose only one skill to master in 2019 it should be creativity, which he defines as “problem solving with relevance and novelty.” According to Mumaw, creativity is set to become a progressively important skill as process-driven jobs and tasks see an increase in automation. And don’t worry if you don’t think of yourself as an innately creative person. “Creativity is a skill and any skill that you can undertake, the byproduct to it being a skill, is that you can get better at it,” Mumaw said in a LinkedIn Learning bootcamp.

Becoming more creative isn’t a matter of simply taking a webinar, but is more of a mindset, and as this Entrepreneur article suggests, a lifestyle choice that takes into account everything from who you spend your time with to how much you sleep. Meanwhile, find out how a hobby can help you jump-start your creativity and boost work performance.