I agree that coronavirus stopped the world, but at the same time, it gave such a big push towards improvements of the job market. People understood that now they are responsible for their own time and results. There are no team lead behind your back that time-to-time check your screen if you don’t watch YouTube videos. Consequently, employees became more effective or lost their jobs if new reality didn’t work for them. Thus, how coronavirus changed the future job market? What are the new required skills for candidates? What employer is looking now for in your CV? Let’s take a look closer!
Required Skills
As almost 80% of companies management agree that remote work is here to stay for the long term, it creates new requirements for employees. First of all, HR managers expect you to have such skills as:
- Strong Self-Management
You need to be able to manage your tasks, day and results by yourself. As you are working from home, it easy to get distracted and start, for example, cleaning or do shopping. As a result, you need to be focused on your working tasks and show a distracted and start, for example, cleaning or go shopping. To avoid such procrastination, start planning your day hour by hour. For this, you can use a diary (paper notebook), Google Calendar or other advanced tools. Write tasks that need to be done down and cross them when they are ready. You will see how this small thing will increase your performance not only at work but also in the personal life. Self-management is not about controlling, it’s about right caring about yourself.
Maybe it can seem obvious, but recruiters and talent sources, that are trying to hire a remote employee, will look for this skill on your CV. Time management is not about working from 9 am till 6 pm. Time management is about making the most out of your time, especially by working remotely. Large enterprise software development corporations used to have time tracking systems to see how much time you spend on your working tasks. However, nowadays fewer companies use such methods and trust their employees. As a result, you need to have perfect time management and time estimations skills. If you plan your time at Google Calendar, make notes about every meeting, call or quick sync, and always meet deadlines, you will be on top of the list for your dream job. Believe me, this skill is highly important.
To boost your time management skills, I recommend you define the most active and productive time. For someone, the perfect working time is early in the morning, while others are really energetic in the evening. If you are more active in the morning, do all important and hard tasks then, and vice versa.
3. Perfect Communication Skills
Whereas online communication is much more complicated than face-to-face meetings, perfect communication skills are on the top list of required skillset. There are a few tips that can help you to boost your communication management level:
- Solve technical issues. First of all, get a good camera for video calling. Most of the new laptops have it, however, if you are using a PC, take care of your camera. It’s important if people can see you and you can see them. Video calling makes communication easier and you don’t have a feeling that you are talking just to a screen. Secondly, check the speed of your internet at home. Calling requires a lot of data, and if your speed is too low, calls can be interrupted and frozen.
- Start your working calls with small talk. Learn about a person’s day, after work plans, ask about their weekends. This can help you to learn more about your workmate, make both of you relaxed and ready to talk about serious work stuff.
- Make notes of what you want to say and discuss at the meeting. Even if it’s just one-two things, visualise your thoughts on paper. It will help you to stick to the plan and not forget about anything important if a conversation suddenly changes its flow in a different direction.
New Working Schedule
Pandemic made changes not just to the required skill set, but also it fully changed our working schedule. Have you noticed that people started to work a bit later? Because we working from home, we became a bit more flexible in our schedule. Many people do exercises/running in the morning just before the working day starts, because now they don’t need to go to the office after. As a result, they have time for sports and shower afterwards at home.
However, this working schedule still differs accordingly to where are you working and what exactly are you doing. Let’s imagine that you are working at a fintech software development company and cooperating with many banks and financial institutions on a full-time basis. In this case, you are less flexible at your working schedule because banks probably start working between 8-9 am and want you to be available for morning standups. However, you can make a working schedule suitable for both sides, as corona makes us not time-oriented, but result-oriented.
Updated Project Management
We used to see a flip chart in every room of the office. However, what’s now? No planning on boards with a team? Where to have all notes saved? Of course, it is also fully moved online to different interactive tools. You can work online with your team on the same document in Google Docs, create mindmaps at Miro or plan the coming quarter in Trello. Tools like these are really easy to use, so you can practice by yourself and write them down on your CV. Frankly speaking, online project management skills are essential for each employer nowadays.
To sum up and to be ready for a post-pandemic job market, you need to know three things: improve your communication skills, learn and discover as many online tools for better working as possible, boost your time/self-management skills and be ready for changes. Coronavirus won’t last forever, however remote work can. Better to be prepared!