According to a recent article published by Yahoo! Finance, we moved from the times of “The Great Resignation” to the age of “Great Talent Stagnation”. This is a significant shift from employees’ market to employers’ market. The survey was conducted by University of Phoenix. While you can attribute a self-serving nature to this survey, it is undeniable that the talent gap has increased significantly in this new age of AI.
What are the things that you can control?
- Your mindset.
- Your initiative.
- Your can-do attitude.
- Your work ethic.
We will take a contrarian, yet pragmatic approach than just learning hard skills.
Skills are a means to an end for creating Value. What gets you valued, rewarded and promoted at work is providing value. I want to acknowledge during bad market conditions, you are on the chopping block despite being a valuable team member. I want to reiterate that this article was written addressing only for the things that are in your control.
In order to provide value, you need to understand what the potential problems are, that if solved, would add to the bottomline or top line or collective intelligence or whatever your team/company values.
How do you identify problems and turn them into opportunities?
By listening to people, simple. Listening is a lost art in the age of WFH. Every conversation is a structured meeting and there is no scope for an organic conversation. By indulging in a no stakes conversation, good listening and open-ended questions, you can understand the big challenges that people in your orbit are facing. Sometimes they can articulate the problem but often times, they cannot.
By engaging people in conversations, you will often surface problem patterns. It is a good practice to summarize conversations so that you confirm the exact motivations behind what they are communicating.
You found some potential opportunities. Now what?
You can write down the problem statement in a short one-pager in a crisp format and share it with them and others. Also, provide potential solution options, benefits/challenges with each approach, gaps that need to be addressed to solve the problem, whose help would be needed and what skillsets are needed. I would suggest that you have to paint a picture of how success would look like.
There are three goals with this that you are trying to accomplish with this exercise.
- You display initiative to solve a problem that’s been affecting everyone but yet, going unnoticed
- You build the reputation as a problem solver.
- You build a good network.
What next?
Obviously, there are always limitations to certain parts of the solution I proposed. I can write an entire book talking about problem solving. In this day and age, when AI can take over most high skilled jobs, there are still a lot of problems waiting to be solved sitting dormant in people’s mind. These problems do not have a digital footprint yet. Your mission, if you choose to accept :-), is to bring those hidden problems to the fore through practice and become indispensable while adding value to everyone around you.
BYC 
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