10 Most Marketable Technical Skills in the 21st Century

The last three months have seen more than 10 companies fire over 4,000 people with some of them completely closing business in the country for various reasons which include a harsh business environment and what has largely been termed as redundancy.

With the introduction of technology at our job places, most employees’ role is becoming redundant in the company which makes them totally useless to keep and hence leading to firing or retrenchment.

Wages require that employees, through joint effort which is also referred to as teamwork, work to bring in capital for the company to be able to pay them in return, when this is not possible, then companies go down together with their employees whether or not it was a few individuals that did not serve their purpose.

Redundancy is also easily brought about by the inflexibility of an individual to further their skills and embrace development such as technology so as to remain relevant in the job market.

As students prepare to sit their national exams this 2019, it is only wise that as they choose their career paths, they look into the future to enable them easily blend into the job market by choosing careers that will be in demand.

A recent report released by the World Economic Forum (WEF) revealed top skills that the job market will demand by the year 2022.

Future of Jobs Survey (2018) by WEF indicated that one of the most trending skills come 2022 will be analytical thinking, innovation, active learning, and learning strategies.

The survey also ranked creativity, originality, and initiative as another important skill that requires to be heavily considered in the future.

Current and future employees need to be well versed with technology design and programming which will place them higher in the job market.

Critical thinkers with great analytic and complex problem-solving skills will be among the most sought after in 2021, 2022.

Social influencing, especially on online platforms, will remain important as the struggles to weigh on the extent of the importance of the available platforms and how best to exploit them.

It is the expected future that has led to the need to have a new curriculum that will be in line with these demands in the job market.

The skills required for one to be relevant in the future job market are divided into two, soft skills and the hard skills.

Hard skills are those one requires to be trained on in school or online for example accounting and software proficiency.

Soft skills are not-so-tangible skills and cannot be quantified. They are deeply entrenched into one’s personality, discipline, sense of responsibility, social skills, etiquette, listening skills, and emotional intelligence.

Below is a list of hard skills one ought to expect in Most Current and Future Job opportunities;

1. Social Media and Digital Marketing
2. Artificial Intelligence
3. UX Design
4. Software Testing
5. Mobile Application Development
6. Business and Market Analysis
7. People and Talent Management
8. Competitive Strategies
9. Customer Management Systems
10. Data Science
11. Corporate Communications
12. Graphic Design

A great personality will make one a catch for employers and clients among soft skills such as a sense of responsibility, initiative, creativity, leadership, persuasion, motivation, collaboration, work ethic, adaptability, time management, interpersonal skills, and teamwork.

In the choice of career, below is a list of the most marketable Tech skills in demand in the 21st century:

1. Machine Learning
2. Web Development
3. Cyber-Security
4. Data Engineering
5. SEO/SEM marketing
6. Data Visualization
7. UI/UX Design
8. Cloud Computing/AWS
9. Blockchain
10. Internet of Things