Three Kinds of Skills You Must Have in This Economy
Need a Ouija Board for Your Small Business?
The rocky economy has everyone guessing what’s coming next. In fact, that Magic 8-ball is starting to look pretty good to some people. A crystal ball or Ouija board might work, too.
Well, if you need a little help in the visionary department, check out “The Next Millionaires” by Paul Zane Pilzer. The guy is pretty savvy when it comes to putting his finger on current and coming trends. In his book, he offers some simple formulas that might help you evaluate where you are in your life and career, and where you might want to go from here.
Three Kinds of Skills You Must Have in This Economy
One of the best things I like about Paul’s book is the way he identifies the three kinds of skills that we all need to have in the coming years: basic skills, functional skills, and adapting skills.
Most of us already know about the first two kinds of skills. Paul defines basic skills as “you ability read, write, speak, calculate, and process information.” These are the basics that we learned in school, and are needed in just about every kind of work or job. If you gaps in any of these basic skills, Paul suggesting taking the time to fill those gaps now.
Functional skills are the specialized skills that we have developed since we left school. These include skills from “on the job training” and from further schooling. For instance, accountants have functional skills in accounting and number-crunching. Auto mechanics have functional skills in fixing vehicles.
In the past, we learned that having basic and functional skills guaranteed us a job for life. No longer. These days, having specialized skills in a specific niche can be deadly to your career. It’s like having special skills as a carriage driver as the automobile makes its entrance onto the transportation scene. Talk about being a dinosaur! These days, people with niche skills are going the way of the dinosaur faster than ever.
Why Every Small Business Owner Needs Adaptive Skills
The speed at which business and industry are changing means that we now need that third set of skills - the adapting skills. Paul defines adapting skills as “the ability with which you learn new things.”
If your business goes the way of the dinosaur, do you have the skills to adapt and change quickly? If a competitor comes up with a copycat product, can you take advantage of something else, like a new marketing technique, to distinguish your business from your competitor’s?
With the economy unpredictable, your ability to generate and sustain wealth is dependent, to a large extent, on your ability as a small business owner learn something new. You have to be able to learn something new quickly and thoroughly.
This kind of gives you food for thought when it comes to the old business standbys like:
“Not invented here.”
or
“This is the way we’ve always done it!”
Do you need to come up with a new affirmation or mantra for your business?
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Photo credit: Fortune Telling Collectibles
