Why Your Value is More Important Than Your Hard Skills: 3 Critical Questions
April 20, 2023
This is not your parents’ job market. Gone are the days where you could rely solely on your technical skills and education to land great jobs.
Why? Because the shelf life of many technical skills in Canada has diminished from over 30 years, to less than 6 years today. And it’s continuing to contract at record pace, especially with our human race against machines and AI.
Today it’s about your value. Why? Because a job can be ripped from you in a second, but your value stays with you for life. This is why value is taking precedence over hard skills now and in the decades to come.
So, how do you determine your value?
Most professionals have been taught to manage their careers this way:
Get a post-secondary education or certification.
Get relevant experience.
Work hard.
This used to work and would often be enough to keep your career humming for years - or even a lifetime. You could trust that your skills would still be relevant decades later.
But this doesn’t work anymore. We’re living in one of the most explosive economic growth periods of all time with automation and AI eliminating jobs in quantum leaps.
Disruptive tech companies are putting pressure on legacy industries. Remote work is giving employers access to global talent pools. And the decarbonization of the economy will change almost every industry.
As a result of this, the value of your ‘hard’ skills is shrinking – fast.
As IBM notes:
“Research suggests that skills generally have a “half-life” of about five years, with more technical skills at just two and a half years.”
But this isn’t the only wake-up call for professionals. Not only are their skills less relevant to employers, but there is also unprecedented job market competition.
From the Globe & Mail:
“More than half of Canada’s working-age population has graduated from either university or college, the highest proportion in the G7 industrialized countries, according to the latest data from the 2021 census.”
So, how do employers make hiring decisions when they’ve got dozens or hundreds of resumes of people who all have the same skills?
Today, they hire you based on your value.
It’s not your skills. It’s not your experience. It’s your VALUE.
A job can be ripped away from you in seconds. Maybe that’s already happened. But knowing your value stays with you for life – and that is what you should be paid for in the decades to come.
3 Critical Questions to Determine Your Value
1. What am I guaranteed to get from you - no matter what job or industry?
Imagine waking up tomorrow and suddenly nobody wanting or needing whatever you did in your last job. Does this mean your career is over? Only if you’ve identified your value primarily by what you did for a living.
So who are you outside of this? What is someone guaranteed to get from you regardless of your profession, job title or designations?
Imagine being asked this question by the CEO of a company who you meet at a networking event. They’re interested in you but don’t know what to do with you. What will you deliver no matter what job they put you in to? Don’t know? That’s the point of this question. And you need to be able to answer it.
It might be that you are really good at initiating projects and getting things off the ground. That’s not job specific. That’s not industry specific. That’s ‘you’ specific. And it’s just one example. Figure out what you are guaranteed to deliver, and you are one step closer to determining your value.
2. What would you like to be known as the go-to person for in your organization?
What were you known as the go-to person for in your last job? Amongst your friends? Family? As a kid? What would you like to be known as the go-to person for, outside of your hard skills?
This could be the fact that you’re a good listener, or you have a gift in winning back angry customers, or even making people laugh.
How would you like to be of service to others? What would you like everyone from new hires to executives to come to you for? What do you want to be known for?
These are all clues to your value.
3. What have you done that got you into trouble at work – but that you’d do again?
If there’s something you’ve done at work that has perhaps rubbed others the wrong way, but that you’d do again if the situation repeated, that’s a clue to your value – and is what you should be doing MORE of!
You can only suppress your value for so long before you naturally start sharing it with others. Why? Because YOU clearly see value in it – even if others do not.
So, rather than rubbing others the wrong way, seek opportunities where you’re actually being paid for that.
Developing the self awareness to answer these questions will equip you with key skills needed to endure the unprecedented job market shifts ahead – and replace job security (which no longer exists) with career security.
To learn more about how to determine your value, contact info@higherlanding.com.
Jackie Rafter
President, Higher Landing Inc.