Your skillset: Adapting

- Every one of your employees has dozens and dozens of skills. Those skills generally fall into two categories, skills based on a specific body of knowledge, or know skills, K-N-O-W, and skills that are usable in a range of situations, called flex skills. Examples of know skills include car engine repair and product design. And examples of flex skills include analyzing, creating, and empathizing. You may know these as hard and soft skills, but calling them know and flex skills is far more accurate. Our skills define the kinds of problems that each of us can solve. There will be particular know skills that many people need for their specific industry or work role. But by far, the most valuable future skills you can train for today are flex skills, the skills that your workforce will be able to use today and tomorrow. A range of studies by universities and consulting firms point to dozens of important flex skills, such as critical thinking, collaborative problem solving, and social and emotional skills. But if we're forced to focus on one skill for a world of exponential change, it's adapting. The skill of adapting is the perfect complement to a mindset of flexibility. And your AI-powered workforce can use AI tools to develop their adapting skills in three ways. First, to inventory the skills they already have. Even though we all have dozens and dozens of skills, we're typically only aware of a small percentage of these skills. We're kind of like icebergs. There's a small amount of our self knowledge that's above the waterline, but below the waterline are many skills and experiences and learnings that we've often forgotten. Now, AI software can help your employees to learn about their own skills by aggregating their skills information in a hands-free process from sources like LinkedIn, college degrees, learning certificates, and badges and projects they perform through their work. Employees can tell their favorite AI tool to look at online sources about themselves, such as their LinkedIn profile, and then they can ask the software to suggest what the employee's top 10 skills might be. And AI can provide hands-on tools too. Employees can ask their favorite AI tools to quiz them about what skills they've used in their past activities, and to ask employees to list their favorite problems to solve. Your workforce can even ask their favorite AI tool to maintain a profile of their skills and interests. This is how AI tools can offer employees skills insights, looking below the waterline to help them understand their own capabilities and their human potential. If any particular employee's skills self-inventory process shows that they've already demonstrated proficiency at adapting, then all you need to do is help them sharpen their existing adapting skills. But if an employee is still pretty new at adapting, that's where AI tools can really kick in, providing support for developing new skills. These applications can be infinitely patient, helping with repeated learning steps, adapting the learning process to the employee's learning style, and quizzing them on what they've learned. You can even provide your team with AI tools that can help them develop adapting strategies for their work, such as bouncing around ideas with the software for new ways to solve problems. That will help your employees to continually practice their adapting skills.