Q: Someone in our family just graduated from college and it made me wonder as they go out into the job market, whether the skills that recruiters were looking for in 2019 are very different from the ones they preferred 20 years ago when I graduated in 1999. What would you say?

A: The world has changed so much in the 20 years since you graduated. Advances in technology have revolutionized the way we communicate with each other, consume entertainment, access healthcare do our banking and practically every aspect of how we live and work.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane. The big technological challenge back then was Y2K (the fear that something disruptive if not catastrophic was going to happen to all the computers in the world on Jan 1, 2000 because of all those zeros, remember?).

But, back to your question about skills, I like to divide those into two categories:

Hard-skills and Soft-skills

With so much change, it’s no surprise that the hard-skills recruiters look for today are very different than back then. This is because technology has touched every industry –whether education, healthcare, finance- and also because each industry evolves through time.

Plus, we now have whole new industries we couldn’t have predicted. Industries where for example the two most wanted hard-skills are “cloud computing” and “artificial intelligence” –terms that would have sounded like gibberish in 1999. So yes, hard-skills are very different now.

Soft-skills however, are hardly unchanged. The value of these skills seem to stand the test of time.

According to the World Economic Forum these are the top 10 soft-skills desired in 2020:

• Complex problem solving
• Critical thinking
• Creativity
• People management
• Coordinating with others
• Emotional intelligence
• Judgment and decision making
• Service orientation
• Negotiation
• Cognitive flexibility
• Adaptability

What I found fascinating is that when you compare these soft-skills to the top ten soft-skills desired in 2005, you find that eight out of ten of the skills are the identical! This demonstrates how valuable these skills are. No matter how much change we see in hard-skills as technology evolves, soft-skills are likely to remain constant.

©Copyright Eva Del Rio

Eva Del Rio is creator of HR Box™ – tools for small businesses and startups. Send questions to Eva@evadelrio.com