Focusing on Impact

16 Aug 2020 [ career  product  ]

I was reading a blog post where the author was talking about expiring vs permanent skills.

Expiring skills are skills that affect an organisation in a short-term. These skills usually diminish in value as technology trends change over time. Programming in COBOL may not be as lucrative as it was 20 years ago, for example. Android may not be relevant come 20 years in the future. These skills can be acquired, may it be by online tutorials, or through formal education. We usually call them hard-skills.

Permanent skills on the other hand are skills that are relevant during the industrial revolution, and will also be relevant in the years to come. These skills are harder to define and quantify. We usually call these soft-skills.

The author of the above blog post mentioned several examples of permanent skills. I wanted to add one which I thought would be great to be on the list.

Focusing on Impact

Oftentimes at work, we get presented with multiple tasks that all (hopefully) promotes a business impact to the organisations we work in. Being able to determine which of those tasks is most worthy of our time and effort is a very important skill to have. I think this is true for any industry, and I that doing this maximizes our time, and would often maximise our learning opportunities as well.