Essential Skills in The Job Market

When you are looking for your first job or a new position or career, you need to market yourself by listing essential skills for which employers are looking. You can highlight these job skills in your resume or cover letter, but you want to make sure that the human resources or hiring managers don’t pass over you because you lack certain essential skills. Highlighting certain skills along with specialized training can help you to have a better chance of landing a position in a competitive job market.

Essential Job Skills: Computer Skills

To work in almost any setting, you need to have at least basic knowledge of how to use a computer. Having experience with word processing and spreadsheet programs can help you to have an even better chance of landing a job. Employers in certain environments, such as offices, expect you to have these types of essential skills because they help you to be better able to complete important tasks such as creating reports, putting together spreadsheets or drafting letters.

Most employers want you to be able to do basic tasks such as searching for information and writing emails. In some contexts, such as marketing jobs, being able to use social media is among the essential skills that you need to be able to succeed at your job and eventually go for a higher position.

On your resume, be specific about your experience. Listing your experience level with certain applications, such as Microsoft Word, Outlook or Excel, can let employers know whether you would be able to handle the tasks expected of you. If you go through a staffing agency, you may be asked to take a test to show your proficiency at using certain computer programs.

Essential Job Skills: Communication Skills

On your resume and during the interview process, you need to show employers that you know how to effectively communicate. In any position, you are going to have to use non-verbal and verbal forms of communication, computers and telephones to communicate with your superiors and coworkers.

You may be working with people who don’t speak the same language or who have limited computer abilities. Finding ways to convey messages to them can be important to completing important tasks on time. Knowing how to communicate effectively with others can ensure that you get work completed faster and develop stronger relationships with your coworkers and superiors.

Essential Job Skills: Problem Solving Skills

To be a good employee, you need to know how to solve problems as they come along. Among other essential skills, you want to be able to list problem solving or critical thinking skills on your resume. Employers often search for individuals who can learn multiple jobs. To be versatile in the workplace and handle issues as they come up, you need to have critical thinking skills.

Problem solving skills allow you to understand how to look at tasks asked of you and find more efficient ways to complete the jobs. You could potentially use your essential skills to save a company money and time. You can also bring new ideas and positive changes to your workplace or contribute an idea, produce or service to the company.

When you are looking for a job or trying to switch careers, you want to make sure that you have developed certain essential skills, such as a the ability to work with computers or communicate with others. You work on improving these essential skills through your interactions with other people, school classes, other jobs and practice. The more experience and skills you have, the better chance you have on landing a position in your field of choice.

Enhancing communication skills through emotional awareness

Emotions play an important role in the way we communicate at home and work. It’s the way you feel, more than the way you think, that motivates you to communicate or to make decisions.

 

The way you react to emotionally driven, nonverbal cues affects both how you understand other people and how they understand you.  If you are out of touch with your feelings, and don’t understand how you feel or why you feel that way, you’ll have a hard time communicating your feelings and needs to others. This can result in frustration, misunderstandings, and conflict. When you don’t address what’s really bothering you, you often become embroiled in petty squabbles instead.

 

Emotional awareness provides you the tools needed for understanding both yourself and other people, and the real messages they are communicating to you. Although knowing your own feelings may seem simple, many people ignore or try to sedate strong emotions like anger, sadness, and fear.

 

But your ability to communicate depends on being connected to these feelings. If you’re afraid of strong emotions or if you insist on communicating only on a rational level, it will impair your ability to fully understand others, creatively solve problem, resolve conflicts, or build an affectionate connection with someone.

 

How emotional awareness can improve effective communication

 

Emotional awareness, the consciousness of your moment-to-moment emotional experience, and the ability to manage all of your feelings appropriately is the basis for effective communication.

 

Emotional awareness helps you to:

 

1. Understand and empathise with what is really troubling other people
2. Understand yourself, including what’s really troubling you and what you really want
3. Stay motivated to understand and empathise with the person you’re interacting with, even if you don’t like them or their message
4. Communicate clearly and effectively, even when delivering negative messages
5. Build strong, trusting, and rewarding relationships, think creatively, solve problems, and resolve conflicts
6. Effective communication requires both thinking and feeling

 

When emotional awareness is strongly developed, you’ll know what you’re feeling without having to think about it and you’ll be able to use these emotional cues to understand what someone is really communicating to you and act accordingly. The goal of effective communication is to find a healthy balance between your intellect and your emotions, between thinking and feeling.

 

Emotional awareness is a skill you can learn

 

Emotional awareness is a skill that, with patience and practice, can be learned at any time of life. You can develop emotional awareness by learning how to get in touch with difficult emotions and manage uncomfortable feelings, including anger, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise, and joy. When you know how to do this, you can remain in control of your emotions and behaviour, even in very challenging situations, and communicate more clearly and effectively.