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having strategic thinking and analytical skills is a “very important” or “the most important” factor when considering employees for management roles.
    Besides helping you get and keep jobs, hard skills also allow you to move within your organization. Say you’re an administrative assistant at a large company. You hate what you’re doing but you need the paycheck and the benefits. There’s a job open in IT, and you’re thinking of applying—even though you have no formal training. I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t get the job unless you can demonstrate some significant hard skills in IT. But if you do have those hard skills, well, that’s a completely different story.
    Oana Kelsay, who’s a Global Logistics Planner at Johnson & Johnson, was able to leverage her hard skills—which she’d developed on her own—to move quickly out of her entry-level job. As a college student, she took a job at Johnson & Johnson in their Customer Service department as a way to pay for her education. She says, “I was quite the techie from high school on, so when I joined J&J I quickly became known as the unofficial IT, and my fellow CS reps would call on me to help them solve their problems. Thankfully, I had a great manager who understood my skill set, and when the Customer Service department launched SAP to replace its old AS400, she quickly had me trained on the new system so I could become an SAP power user, assist in solving issues, test the new system, and train my colleagues. I ended up moving to the department I’m currently in, Strategic Planning.”
    And none of that would have happened if Oana hadn’t developed hard skills outside and in addition to her basic responsibilities.
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    Identifying the Skills You Need—Especially if You’re Eying a New Position
    If you’re going to do your current job well, you have to know which hard skills are required. And if you’re thinking about making a lateral—or upward—move within your company, you’ll need to find out the hard skills your new job requires. There are a few ways to do this.
    The most logical place to start is by reading the job description, since most job descriptions include a list of required skills. But because job descriptions don’t always prioritize required skills in a useful way, you should also talk to your manager and drop in to visit the friendly folks in HR. Ask them what skills you’d need to have to do the job you’ve got your eye on. If you’ll need more than one skill, which one should you start with? And how can you go about learning those skills—does the company have in-hours training? Will they pay for you to take classes elsewhere, or are you on your own?
    It’s also a good idea to talk with people who are doing the job you want to do. HR or managers may give you a list of officially required skills, but someone who’s in the trenches every day will have a much better idea of what’s really needed to succeed, and the two lists may or may not overlap. Paul Di Maria, a senior manager at a leading market research firm, does a fantastic job of learning by listening. “I ask around for best demonstrated practices when I feel like my work is getting stale,” Paul says. “I also latch on to any opportunity where I get to listen to people that are tops in my field. That interaction is precious. I hope to know a quarter of what they do, and they never stop learning and developing themselves.”
    All that face-to-face talking sounds a little old-school. So don’t forget about online resources. LinkedIn has become a media company and is now, in a sense, an extension of the face-to-face conversation: LinkedIn captures the most shared content in their system—these are the topics that people feel are the most important—and organizes it by category on linkedin.com/today . Depending on your interests,