As the digital economy continues to grow, upgrading your knowledge and skills is necessary to keep up with the rapid changes in technology.
If you’re a young working adult or fresh graduate, you often hear that you’ll need both hard skills and soft skills to get ahead in the era of digital technology.
And as specific job requirements look beyond technical or hard skills, it’s the soft skills or Meta skills that you will have to cultivate in order to have a fulfilling and meaningful career.
Meta skills are general and reusable skills that may be used broadly to address a wide set of problems, or help you acquire other more specific skills.
In other words, Meta skills are catalysts for learning new skills faster.
It comprises of ‘feeling’, including empathy, intuition and social intelligence; ‘seeing’, which is the ability to think whole thoughts; ‘dreaming’, the skill of applying imagination; ‘making’, which is the skill for devising prototypes; and ‘learning’, which is the ability to learn new skills at will.
And if you’re wondering why Meta skills are so important, it’s mainly because they help build resilience and adaptive capability so that you can stay relevant with any current development.
For instance, if you’re thinking of building a medical gadget that can help thalassaemia patients in the future, you must be open to learn and understand their situation, imagine what kind of tool that can help their condition, and think of how to create the solution to their problem.
With new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), young professionals need to understand that most repetitive tasks have now been or will be taken over by machines.
However, there are also certain roles that machines can’t replace and these include jobs that require social communication, creativity and adaptability.
This is where Meta skills prepare you to be adaptable to the disruptive changes brought about by the digital transformation.
Just remember, skills are temporary but Meta skills are permanent.
But how do we start developing our Meta skills? One way is to start building positive habits. So, start forming habits that we listed earlier.
By the way, the ability to build positive habits is also considered as a useful Meta skill, which will serve you well, especially in the digital economy.
This is a weekly column by SarawakYES! – an initiative driven by Faradale Media-M Sdn Bhd and supported by Angkatan Zaman Mansang (AZAM) Sarawak – to provide advice and stories on the topics of education and careers to support Sarawakians seeking to achieve their dreams. Join us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
This article first appeared on The Borneo Post, published in the print version on Saturday, March 9, 2019.
Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels.
