How cross-skills help take your career to the next level
A guide not only for ordinary employees but also for managers and entrepreneurs. But first, subscribe to our Telegram channel. We often publish such valuable articles!
Linear career has long been a thing of the past. In today’s world, many people have multiple jobs at once, and climbing the career ladder has become surprisingly flexible.
Of course, deep knowledge and honed skills in one area lead to notable achievements. However, this relatively narrow approach limits the number of possibilities. The concept of related skills will help open new horizons.
What are related skills?
Related skills are abilities and skills that are closely related to your profession.
It means that you do not need to start from scratch: to get additional skills, you need to apply the ones you already have. It not only facilitates the learning process but also deepens your competencies.
In addition, cross-skills enhance your existing talents and help you stand out in the workplace and work more effectively in a team.
Find out what professions you have a talent for right now!
Why is it essential to develop related skills?
It will increase empathy for colleagues
We often feel that our work is more complex than that of others. But when an engineer learns more about the responsibilities of a technical writer and a UI designer understands what a UX analyst does, they understand the peculiarities of their colleagues’ tasks and begin to appreciate their contribution to the common cause more. How to develop empathy.
It will improve communication
The study of related skills expands the vocabulary of working terms. And this helps to understand other employees better and interact with them more effectively.
It will keep you motivated
Even if we love our job very much, working on the same projects for too long can be challenging. Adjacent skills allow you to switch between tasks in a broader range.
It will widen the viewing angle
Deep knowledge in areas close to yours helps you notice what others miss. It makes it possible to look for non-standard and more productive solutions.
It will open career prospects
Few designers on the market can code or programmers with design skills. But employees, limited by their field, are countless. Related skills will open new doors and make you a unique specialist.
It will develop the ability to evaluate the skills of others
If you are a boss or an HR manager constantly reviewing candidates, expanding the range of competencies will help you better understand the abilities of newcomers.
All these undoubted advantages of related skills make them useful for managers and those who work in a team. They will be helpful in fruitful cooperation, for example, with business partners or clients.
How to find your related skills
Potentially related skills are not always evident. If you need some inspiration to search, here are some examples from different fields:
Primary Skill — Related Skill
- writing skills — SEO optimization
- design — illustration
- content marketing — SMM
- coding — development of technical documentation
- the financial analysis — scripting
- product management — personnel management
- engineering — product management
- marketing — psychology
- email marketing — community management
An excellent way to find your related skills is to reflect and identify as many abilities as possible that could be useful in your profession.
Although most of the options from the table refer to hard skills, that is, competencies that can be objectively assessed and verified, one should not forget about developing soft skills. These universal socio-psychological qualities increase the chances of success, such as mastery of negotiation techniques or time management.
Once you’ve made a preliminary list of related skills, choose one to focus on shortly. To decide, ask yourself these questions:
- How interested am I in this professional skill?
- Given my current competence, how easy will it be for me to acquire it?
- Will it be useful for my work?
Ideally, the related skill chosen should be intriguing, easy to learn, and rewarding for your career (read How to change attitudes to make your career faster). However, the world’s end will not come if this skill does not meet all three criteria. Let’s say you’re highly interested in learning design, and besides, it will raise your professionalism to a new level, but the study will be complex. Such a scheme will still lead to significant results. Read Ten tips to become a careerist
Take the Menteora career guidance test; artificial intelligence will name your most suitable professions. The accuracy of the test is 70-80% because we use a mathematical-statistical algorithm (read about Menteora's unique career guidance methodology).