The skills that matter when the job keeps changing
AI is changing what organisations need from their people but preparing for what comes next isn’t simply a matter of learning another tool. It starts with understanding the value you already bring and becoming deliberate about what you build next.
There’s no shortage of advice about the skills we’ll need as work continues to change. Learn AI. Get better with data. Understand automation. Add another certification to your CV.
And yes, those things can all be valuable. But before rushing to add another skill, I think there’s a better place to start: What am I already good at, and where do I add the most value?
It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
We spend so much time doing our jobs that we often stop noticing the things that come naturally to us. The problems people consistently ask us to solve. The work we’re known for. The things we do differently or particularly well.
Instead, we tend to think about ourselves in terms of a job title or a position description.
That becomes much harder when something changes. Maybe you’re considering your next role. Maybe an opportunity has come up that you weren’t expecting. Or maybe, as happened to me, redundancy suddenly forces you to think seriously about what comes next.
I’ve been through that process, and one of the most useful things I did was stop looking immediately at what job should I do next? and start looking at what do I bring to the table?
Start with a stocktake, not a job search
When I was made redundant, two customers offered me an unusual opportunity: write your own job description and come and work with us. It was incredibly generous, but it also made me curious. Why were they willing to let me define the role? What did they see in me that I perhaps wasn’t seeing myself?
So, I decided to ask… I sent a short survey to people I trusted and had worked with throughout my career. I asked what they thought my strengths were, where they had seen me perform particularly well, what my weaknesses or blind spots might be, and where they thought I could add the most value.
The responses gave me a very different view of my own capabilities. They also gave me something I really needed at that point: evidence that the things I thought I was good at were valued by other people too.
That exercise played an important part in my decision to start Sasbri Consulting. And I recommend this to anyone thinking about what comes next.
Look back across your career, not just at your current role. Think about the problems people consistently come to you to solve, the feedback you hear repeatedly and the work that gives you energy. Be equally honest about the work that drains you or the areas where you know you need to improve. Sometimes other people can articulate our strengths far better than we can.
Work out what you need to build next
Once you have a better understanding of what you already bring to the table, deciding what to learn next becomes much easier. Say there’s a role you’d like to move into. Look at several examples of that role and the capabilities organisations are asking for, then compare those with your own experience.
You might find there are genuine gaps that require training or certification. Others might be better developed through practical experience, mentoring or exposure to a different part of the business. And sometimes the capability is already there, you just haven't been particularly good at articulating it.
This is one area where I think AI can be genuinely useful.
Give it the role you want, your experience and the skills you already have, and use it to help you identify the gaps. Then go further. Ask it to help you build a development plan, suggest ways to gain practical experience or identify the questions you should be asking someone already doing that role.
I use AI this way myself, and I encourage the people I mentor to do the same, not to make career decisions for you, but to help you think more deeply about them.
Learn to use AI properly
I do think AI capability needs to be on the development plan for most people working in professional roles today. But there’s a big difference between occasionally asking an AI tool a question and knowing how to use it well.
For me, the value is in using AI to extend your thinking.
Before an important stakeholder meeting, for example, you can use it to understand the issues a particular executive might care about and prepare better questions. If you're moving into a new area, it can help you get across unfamiliar terminology or concepts much faster. If you have an idea, you can use it to pressure-test your thinking or help structure a business case before you take it to leadership.
You can also use it to learn.
If there’s an area you know you need to develop, ask AI to explain it, challenge your understanding, give you scenarios to work through and help you build a learning plan. That doesn't replace experience, formal training or expertise. But it does give us a tool we didn't have before to take much more ownership of how we develop.
The human skills still matter. A lot.
The interesting thing about all this technology is that I think it makes some of the more human skills even more important. One of the biggest is listening.
I've spent much of my career working with customers, partners and technology businesses, and genuinely good listening is rarer than you might think. If you really listen to someone, you start to understand what the problem is rather than jumping immediately to the solution you want to give them.
From there, you need to be able to simplify.
In technology particularly, it's easy to talk about products, features and technical capability. The harder skill is being able to take something complex and explain why it matters to the person sitting opposite you.
What problem does it solve? What changes for their business? Where is the value?
And then there are relationships.
AI can help you research an account, find an opportunity, prepare for a meeting and automate parts of a process. It can't do the relationship-building for you. If you approach every interaction as a transaction, you're likely to end up with a transactional relationship. The relationships that last are built over time by listening, being useful, following through and establishing trust.
For anyone building a career in technology, I wouldn't underestimate the value of developing those skills alongside the technical ones.
Find people who will challenge you
I've also been fortunate throughout my career to work with leaders who backed my ideas but didn't simply say yes to everything. They asked questions.
What's the commercial impact? What evidence do you have? Have you thought about how this affects the rest of the business? What would need to happen to make it work?
At the time, I probably didn't think of those conversations as mentoring. Looking back, that's exactly what many of them were.
Those leaders were teaching me to look at an idea from different angles, think more commercially and articulate what I was proposing in a way that other people could understand and support.
That's why I'm a big believer in finding mentors and sponsors, particularly people who have experience in the areas you're trying to develop.
It's also one of the reasons I enjoy coaching people at different stages of their careers today.
Good coaching isn't about someone giving you all the answers or telling you which job to take. Sometimes you need someone outside the situation who can ask better questions, challenge your assumptions and help you work out what you want to do next, and what it will take to get there.
Don't wait until something changes
We tend to think seriously about our careers when we're forced to. There's been a restructure. We've been made redundant. We're unhappy in a role. A promotion comes up. Or we suddenly realise the skills that got us here might not be the skills we need for what comes next.
That's a difficult time to start figuring everything out… So don't wait.
Take stock of your strengths while things are going well. Learn to use AI before it becomes an expected part of the role you want. Build relationships before you need an introduction. Develop your commercial skills before you're sitting in front of an executive trying to get an idea over the line.
Keep learning, whether that's through practical training, a certification, mentoring, coaching or putting your hand up for something that stretches you.
You don't need to know exactly what your job will look like five or ten years from now. I certainly couldn't have predicted the path my own career would take. But you can understand what you're good at. You can be honest about what you need to work on. And you can keep building the skills and relationships that give you more options when something does change.
Some of the biggest shifts in my career started with opportunities I wasn't expecting. A role I hadn't planned on taking. A move to another country. A redundancy I definitely didn't ask for.
None of them looked particularly significant at first.
That's the thing about career opportunities. You don't always recognise the important ones when they arrive.
The best thing you can do is keep developing, know what you bring to the table and be ready to back yourself when they do.
Watch the full podcast episode: She Lost Her Job — Then Built the Career She Actually Wanted | Lee-ann Dias - YouTube
Ready to work out what comes next?
Whether you’re starting your career, stepping into something new or preparing for your next leadership move, Sasbri’s coaching programs give you dedicated one-on-one support to take stock of where you are, identify where you want to go and build a practical plan to get there.
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