We’re all looking for that silver bullet, right?

The thing or things that’ll let us accelerate past everyone else to reach our aspirations in record time.

Sadly, life doesn’t work that way, but we can recognise the key habits, behaviours and skills that’ll enable career success in the long term.

Especially with lifelong employability.

That’s not a phrase which is used often in the careers game. But, it’s what we’re all aiming for when you think about it.

We’re all just trying to build the talent stack (my term for all your skills, experience, habits and behaviours rolled into one) that’ll give us that code which enables us to keep being employed.

This is not about staying in one career or being with one employer.

This is about building the talent stack which allows each of us to adapt to the ever-changing world, thus enabling us to be employable. You don’t want to be stuck and stale when it comes to career success.

This is something I preached in detail in the How to win in the Careerverse playbook.

As a learning and performance consultant, I spend (probably) too much time reading research on high-performing people, places and how this translates into the modern workplace.

Something that I’ve been obsessing over the last year is the 3-5 skills, habits and behaviours that modern organisations need from their people.

And, how each of us can build these to navigate the careers landscape today and tomorrow.

5 essential skills, habits and behaviours

Ok, let’s talk about the components you should focus on to build your talent stack for lifelong employability.

1/ Resilience

The team at EveryDay Health define resilience as:

The ability to withstand adversity and bounce back from difficult life events. Being resilient does not mean a person doesn’t experience stress, emotional upheaval, and suffering. Resilience involves the ability to work through emotional pain and suffering.

Obviously, none of us wants to suffer.

Yet, we can learn valuable lessons during these times to take forward into the future. Dealing with sudden change is something that happens often in the working world.

This could be through a reorganisation or perhaps taking on a new role. No matter what it is, deploying your own resilience will greatly help you.

One does not just ‘build resilience’ though.

It is learnt through experiences over time. So, no, I can’t give you a course or perfect resource to help you. However, the folks at EveryDay Health have curated some great insight to help us all with this.

2/ Adaptability

I describe this as the ability to navigate new landscapes and deal with ambiguity. Which, in my opinion, is basically the ride of life.

The capability to adapt to new environments, new times or when presented with new data is key.

Classic examples of this include when Spotify disrupted the music industry with streaming, and when Apple released the iPhone, introducing the first smartphone and apps into our lives.

Recognising and understanding the need to adapt to a changing world is essential.

CEO of Vayner X, Gary Vee is a classic example of this.

Gary inherited a bricks-and-mortar wine business from his father. It was a small-scale operation with a few local stores.

This was in 1998 and Gary soon realised that the times were changing. He stumbled across an emerging, and little know at the time, video sharing platform called YouTube.

Gary felt this new piece of technology could help scale his business.

“I was completely convinced that online video was going to be a big thing. I knew it was a medium that was going to matter”
Gary Vaynerchuk

The old guard at the time didn’t see the changes in the world through the power of the internet and more new digital technologies. Or, perhaps, they didn’t want to face them.

Gary was told countless times that he was ‘crazy’ and going to ‘destroy his father’s business’. Instead, that little old Wine Library TV show Gary shared on YouTube blew up.

It blew up so much that Gary pivoted his career into the world of social marketing and broader entrepreneurship.

YouTube is now a daily must-use app and Gary sits atop multiple successful companies. And why so? Simple, he built the capability to adapt to the world around him, not try to make the world adapt to him.

You’ll never win with the latter.

3/ Digital Intelligence

This really has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with awareness.

If one thing is apparent across many generations of people I’ve worked with, it’s the lack of knowledge when it comes to using and understanding how basic digital technologies work.

A classic example of this can be found in workplace technology.

The average company provides employees with over 88 different apps to use in their workflow. That’s a lot of choices, right?

This often leads to trying to use too many tools and only utilising them to less than 10% of their capabilities. Bad for your skills and your work.

It’s important in an ever-growing digital world, where the lines between physical and digital are blurring almost daily, that we get better with understanding how tech can support us.

Those who are tech-savvy will have more career opportunities available in the long term.

This is not about learning how to code or architect a system. It’s far simpler than that. This is about knowing about popular and useful tech, and how you can use it to support your skills and career.

Consider how people use YouTube as a learning resource and the features of LinkedIn to build a professional brand and learn new skills.

Digital intelligence is about knowing how to use technology to support you.

4/ Emotional Intelligence

If there was one thing I wish they would teach us all at school, it’s emotional intelligence.

It’s weird that as emotional beings that we don’t recognise we have them and often try to suppress them. Especially in the workplace.

Emotions drive our behaviours, mood and actions. They are the data we use to interpret the world around us. The sooner we learn this, the easier life can be to navigate.

And, guess what? Emotions matter in the workplace too.

Healthy emotional cultures where people recognise and understand the impact of their and others’ emotions are instrumental in enabling us to do our best work.
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The team at Verywell Mind define emotional intelligence as:

The ability to perceive, interpret, demonstrate, control, evaluate, and use emotions to communicate with and relate to others effectively and constructively.
Verywell Mind

Here’s a few tips on improving your own emotional intelligence:

Be aware of your emotions.
The first step to improving your emotional intelligence is to be aware of your own emotions. Pay attention to how you feel in different situations and what triggers those emotions. Once you are aware of your emotions, you can start to manage them more effectively.
Be aware of other people’s emotions.
In order to be emotionally intelligent, you also need to be aware of other people’s emotions. Pay attention to the nonverbal cues that people use to communicate their feelings. This can help you better understand how they are feeling and respond in a way that is helpful to them.
Practice empathy.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. When you are able to empathise with someone, you are better able to understand their perspective and provide support when they need it. To practice empathy, try putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagining how they might feel in a given situation

5/ Future-Fit

This is not a skill nor a behaviour, it’s more of a habit or, perhaps, a state of mind.

I define being Future-Fit as understanding the skills you need to be world-class and navigate the current world, and have the curiosity to develop what’s needed for tomorrow’s world.

We’re blessed and cursed as a species with the ability to remember what has been but have the foresight to look ahead to what may come.

Now doing either can be problematic but with the right intent and context, they can be useful. We can’t predict the future, but we can do our best to plan for it with the data we have today.

When I think about being Future-Fit, I think about having the right skills in place to keep navigating the world and to do all of the above points.

It’s quite fitting that this last point rolls everything we’ve discussed so far into a kinda neat completion.

One of the ways I find useful to keep myself ready for what tomorrow might bring is conducting quarterly health checks for my skills.

It might sound like a cringey tagline. But skills pay the bills, so it makes sense to assess them often, right?

If we can keep building the right skills to navigate life and the career game, we can take some control of building opportunities and charting our own course.

Invest in yourself

That’s a wrap on this folks.

Of course, this list will evolve over time. Yet, I sense some of these will always be what enables each of us to design a rewarding career on our own terms.

Before you go… 👋

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