Kempton Presley is Chief Strategy Officer at AdhereHealth, a healthcare tech leader in medication adherence insights and health outcomes.
As tech jobs evolve and AI innovation takes hold, “soft” skills, like communication and collaboration, are just as important as coding.
Vocational success hinges on connection. As AI rapidly transforms every facet of our technological ecosystem, narrow technical expertise—no matter how deep—can make individual contributors much more susceptible to underuse, isolation and irrelevance. In the current environment, skills that were once “employment invincibility cloaks” are becoming outdated every day.
Likewise, disconnectedness from business context and priorities is an increasing liability for coders, architects and data scientists as their employers struggle to connect powerfully unique talents with operational needs. Organizations that fail to address the challenge may miss out on the value of deploying this talent optimally.
Fortunately, there are pathways to greater business connections in this age of AI. Individuals, teams and organizations can protect and elevate their greatest assets by investing in human capital by focusing on the following soft skills.
Flexibility
Individuals with a solid generalized understanding of data science concepts and the ability to deploy the right solutions to solve the right problems are well-positioned to come out on top of the AI revolution. I refer to these types of people as “chefs,” meaning they can quickly master new “recipes” for tech success or even whip something up with whatever is available.
An organization might hire the world’s foremost expert with a particular tool or coding language, but if the strategy shifts away from those technologies, adaptability becomes a new form of invincibility.
Business Sense
Specialized expertise can accompany a false sense of security, compounded by contextual blind spots.
Sometimes, as techies and data gurus, we take non-linear paths. We make creative and transformative breakthroughs that are gratifying, but we can inadvertently overlook how that work fits into the larger business and helps the organization achieve its most important goals.
The wisest team members invest time into learning the “bigger picture” of their organization and industry, allowing them to tie their work to the company’s strategic objectives. There is also wisdom in joining a team that pursues business outcomes rather than those that prioritize cool projects without clear business value.
Storytelling
It’s not enough to understand how work impacts business goals or be willing to change things up to help the organization. Tech employees must also be able to communicate with other departments—and, in some cases, customers—about the value of their work.
Shaping narratives and numbers that make sense to a non-technical audience is often critical for buy-in. This skill, which can include the ability to demonstrate software or data visualization, has numerous advantages. A mediocre idea communicated brilliantly is far more likely to take off than a brilliant idea communicated poorly.
Diverse Communications Currencies
Not everyone is a natural orator, and that’s okay. Storytelling doesn’t necessarily have to involve public speaking—or any sort of speaking.
I recently commissioned a group of student interns to help me develop a data-driven social vulnerability framework for Medicare plans. During our months of weekly virtual meetings, the students were polite but spoke very little. Based on those calls, I worried our work together wouldn’t produce anything. And yet, at the end of the term, the team assembled their ideas and wrote a collaborative paper that blew me away.
The lesson I learned is that talent shines differently via different communication channels. That said, tech professionals should diversify their communication skills because they may not always be able to make up for a bad impression with a great paper.
Teamwork
The ability to collaborate is important, but there is an even more basic skill: the ability to get along with others.
We’ve all met the “indispensable” IT pros—the ones who can come and go as they please because they’re the only ones who understand a certain mission-critical system. Unfortunately, these employees are culture killers.
Instead of concentrating institutional knowledge on one person, form teams of collaborative individuals who are willing to share best practices with one another.
Critical Thinking
19th-century German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke is credited with saying, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Mike Tyson is often credited with an even blunter version: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
At some point, most tech pros are going to be asked to “MacGyver” together a solution with the IT equivalent of duct tape and chicken wire. When that day comes, critical thinking and problem-solving skills will be much more important than expertise with a particular technology.
Leadership
Finally, it’s important to have people on board who can see these skills in others.
Not every IT professional needs to be a natural-born leader. But the ability to recognize others’ strengths, create a coordinated plan for progress and delegate tasks can be a difference-maker. Both the individuals who develop these management capabilities and the organizations that know how to identify them will reap their rewards.
Conclusion
Thanks largely to the ongoing rise of AI, we are likely to see more technology breakthroughs in the next couple of years than at any other time in history. To be sure, technical wizardry will be necessary to unlock these advances. But the ideas that change the future will come from organizations whose employees can work together to solve complex business problems—and who can communicate these ideas to the wider world.
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