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How To Build A Better Career By Unlocking Your Connected Skills
Ross Stevenson
December 12th, 2023
Today’s Thoughts ☠️
Hey there 👋,
I escaped the snowstorm and the writer’s room - win 🏆
Today, we’re breaking down what the value of a skill is and how you can maximise any skill’s value by complementing it with the right skills.
The basis for today’s convo comes from a recently published report called “What is the price of a skill?”.
The report is meaty, so I’ve distilled what we need to know, consider and implement as smart L&D pros.
Get your tea 🍵 or beverage of choice ready. We've got lots to discuss!
In today’s chat👇
Est reading time: 12 mins
THE BIG THOUGHT
Unlock Your Connective Skills For A Better Career
Skills are better together.
But, are you connecting the right ones?
As part of my ongoing skills anthology, it makes sense to unpack what is the real value of our skills. I mean, we spend so much time talking, investing and building them, we should get clear on the value they bring, right?
To help us on this journey, a very tasty and long (they’re always long!) research paper from 2023 called "What is the Price of a Skill? The Value of Complementarity".
It investigates the economic value of skills in the context of complementarity, which refers to how well a skill can be combined with other skills, ideally of high value to benefit each of us.
Don't worry, I’m not going to regurgitate everything it says.
Instead, I’ve distilled what I feel are the best insights for you to know, explore and apply in your work.
At a glance, this research tells us
The value of a skill is relative and depends on the skill background of the worker
An analysis of 962 skills found that most skills have the highest value when used in combination with skills of a different type.
The report also examines the value of Artificial Intelligence (AI) skills, which are found to be particularly valuable, increasing worker wages by 21% on average due to their strong complementarities and rising demand in recent years.
How can you calculate the value of a skill?
💵 The million-dollar question.
As always, the answer is incredibly contextual. Let me unpack that with the guidance of the report.
The authors propose a method that attaches a market value to skills based on market demand and supply as well as their complementarity with other skills.
That means straightforward and logical. I like it!
Let’s move beyond the surface and get a bit nerdier with this. The report echoed one word continuously “complimentary”. The authors defined this through 3 aspects:
Number of Complements. The number of adjacent skills should be positively related to a skill's value.
Diversity of Complements. The diversity of adjacent skills should be positively related to a skill's value.
Value of Complements. The value of the adjacent skills should be positively related to a skill's value.
Key Takeaway:
The value of a skill is higher if it can be combined with a diverse set of other skills of high value.
In sum: A network of the right skills is vastly more valuable than one skill alone or a mixture of competing skills.
The one skill to rule them all
Of course, this skill doesn’t exist.
But, unsurprisingly, AI is making a strong case for the future.
As if the word of the year couldn’t boost its appeal even further, the report authors found:
We show that skills needed to construct and maintain AI, which is widely considered to be a major breakthrough technology, have significantly higher skill values than the other skills in our dataset—With a premium of 21 %, AI skills are far more valuable than the average skill in our sample (4 %). AI skills have an above average number of complements of large diversity, since AI technologies enter more and more domains for knowledge work. Furthermore, we track the development of skill values over time and find that AI skills, such as Deep Learning and Python have been gaining in value significantly in recent years. Our model allows us to ascribe these changes to an increase in demand relative to supply.
AI is here to stay and we can’t (and shouldn’t) ignore it.
How you can use these insights
Firstly, let’s cover what you can take away as an individual investing in their skills for the future.
Identify your complementary skills
Focus on AI Skills (delegation and collaboration)
Understand Skill Value
Utilise skill stacking and develop T-shaped skills (see the section below on ‘tools’)
Always look to reskill and upskill
How to identify your complementary L&D skills
This is something I’ve covered in detail before.
My 2023 article on the 7 skills L&D teams need to succeed will help you explore this in detail. Yet, everything should be contextual for you. My article explores what I see as the baseline for a modern L&D pro.
Your role will no doubt have nuances that I cannot know or directly account for.
I’d recommend you check out the ‘tools’ section below to explore both the concept of skills stacking and T-shaped skills. These will both help you identify what could be some of the most valuable skills to complement and build a high-value skill network.
How to use these insights to inform your 24/25 L&D strategy
Ok. Let’s turn you into the smartest L&D pro in the room in the coming year's strategy session.
Here’s 4 actions you can take based on this research:
1/ Develop the concept of a complementary skills network
Your workforce won’t organically think of skill development in this way.
We’ve been taught about skills and hear tons about skills-based organisations. But very little on how to structure our own skills network.
→ This can be a simple educative piece through an article or email series.
Use what we’ve discussed so far to educate people on not only the acquisition of the right skills. Teach them how a network of complementary or connective skills is a worthwhile long-term strategy for future-proofing a career.
2/ Highlight complementarity in L&D programs
It’s no good educating teams on the power of complementary skills and your solutions/resources/programs not aligning with this.
Make it clear how your solutions link to other skills. Showcase which of these works best with other things you’ve built. If you make it so simple to build a complementary skill network, people's behaviours will change.
3/ Promote AI Skill development
No shock or horror here.
Given the increasing value of AI skills, prioritising the development of AI skills among teams is a no-brainer. Especially given their strong complementarities and rising demand, which the research suggests leads to an average increase in worker wages by 21%.
You can get my step-by-step guide to crafting an AI skill-building strategy for your organisation here and access my zero-cost library of AI for L&D insights on the website.
4/ Communicate the value of skills
Building on the first point.
Your people probably aren’t going to get this concept the first time around. Like any change in patterns of thinking, you have to say the same thing a hundred different ways, a hundred different times.
One way to guarantee this hits home is by leveraging financial outcomes.
The better your skills the more money you can command. Think of skills as the currency we each grow across the career marketplace. Companies pay top dollar for the best on the market.
⚒️ Connective skill-building tools
T-Shaped Skills: An incredibly popular methodology and one I still find much use in sharing. Get full details on what, why and how to apply in your work here.
Skill stacking: A model not too dissimilar to others I’m sharing here but one less formal than what you expect for the corpo world. Learn more.
The power of combining skills: A helpful set of insights to approach the skill algorithm.
A collection of modern skill-building strategies: Everything from Ikigai to the 3 E’s skills framework.
📊 Useful Charts
The value of AI skills
The most profitable skills tend to have a higher exposure to AI.
Combine and grow for value
The main idea is that combining skills from different areas is more beneficial, as illustrated in Figure A. Similarly, Figure B demonstrates that having a range of skills within the same field also adds value.
Final thoughts
The value of a skill is strongly determined by its complementarity, meaning how well it can be combined with other skills
The value of a skill is relative and depends on an employee's skill background
AI collaboration and delegation skills are the most in demand today
Design L&D solutions that enable intelligent connective skill-building
Get more from the skills anthology:
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🥋 THE DOJO
Ready To Become AI Confident in L&D This Christmas?
A recent Boston Consulting Group and Harvard report discovered people working with AI:
Completed 12.2% more tasks
25.1% faster task completion
Over 40% higher quality work
Plus…
Some more stats that caught my eye:
Regular users of generative AI are much more optimistic than nonusers (62% vs. 36%).
Regular users of generative AI also recognise the technology’s transformative potential, both to improve and to threaten work.
If you want to work smarter and future-proof your skills in 2024, I’ve got just the thing for you.
Learn how to leverage the power of ChatGPT for L&D with my Crash Course.
I like to say the Crash Course is much more than a course.
That’s because you get:
Monthly course updates
Free monthly course newsletter with actionable tips and tools
Access to the private L&D ChatGPT community with over 80 students
It’s a continuous learning experience, not a one-time event.
→ Pick up my self-paced ChatGPT crash course and spend a few hours with me to become AI confident ahead of 2024.
SMART THOUGHTS
Content that will make you smarter.
🤔 What two tech bros opposing stories can teach us
It's been a significant year for two notable figures in tech: Sam Bankman-Fried and Sam Altman. Their stories, although contrasting, offer valuable insights into careers and life.
💡 Take inspiration from AstraZeneca’s AI Upskilling
Yes, I cover this every week. It’s important, ya know.
I’ve covered extensively why better AI education is the way to go for 2024, and not getting giddy over more tools. I laid out my thesis and guide to building your strategy here.
This post from an AZ employee on their work to upskill the workforce on AI caught my eye as one of the few organisations actually doing something in this space.
🔥 Barack Obama on the future of work
Hanging around LinkedIn grants you (often unwanted) access to daily future of work predictions.
Some have more weight and credibility than others. This one from former president, Barack Obama, is one of those. In this video, he discussed the working world, the importance of knowing your worth and the impact of AI.
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