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Test Your Future-Proof IQ: You’d Be Surprised What Most Leaders Get Wrong

When it comes to iPads, video production, and Apple technology, my technology consultant is my eleven-year-old niece Abbey. And yet, when Abbey was born, there was no YouTube, no social media, no smartphones, we didn’t have a street directory in our pockets, we only took cameras on holiday, and we couldn’t carry an entire library with us.

If the world has changed so much in the last decade, just imagine how much more it will change in the next. As leaders, we’re expected to prepare our teams and organisations for that unknown future.

The skills you need for the future aren’t technical, task-oriented skills – because those skills will become obsolete through automation and artificial intelligence. Instead, the most future-proof skills will be higher-order thinking skills.

As a leader, it’s also not enough to just consider whether you have that skill. If you want your team to be fit for the future, you must take responsibility for developing these skills in your team members as well.

So what ARE the skills for the future?

When presenting at conferences, I ask my audiences to identify these skills, and of course we get the usual suspects – things like communication, innovation, creativity, productivity, emotional intelligence, and so on.

The Institute for the Future, based at the University of Phoenix in the USA , has identified ten such skills. They identified these skills by examining six global megatrends and drivers of change, and assessing the skills most valuable for coping with (and leading) these trends.

I wrote about these ten skills in an article for “Consumer Directions”, the industry magazine for SOCAP, the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals. If you would like to see the full list, you can download and read the article.
[READ-NOW href=https://www.dropbox.com/s/g04r7mte7zaletk/2016-12-SOCAPConsumer%20Directions-GihanPerera.pdf?dl=1]

Next month, I’m also running two workshops for SOCAP – in Sydney and Melbourne – to help leaders develop these skills in their team members, so they can future-proof their career, their teams, and their business. These workshops are open to everybody (not just SOCAP members). So if you’re a business leader and you’re interested in attending, there are still places available.

[FIND-OUT-MORE href=http://socap.org.au/training/gihan-perera-skills-fit-future-workforce-speakers-tour/]

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