4 Critical Skills Every Graduate Needs to Get Hired
Joe Vacca | 
We know you want the job, but have you invested the effort on yourself to make sure your personal skillset matches what employers are looking for? Here are the 4 key skills that every graduate must have if they want to be seriously considered as a competitive applicant—especially for today’s most sought-after technology jobs:
#1 Soft Skills
Psychologists have a fancy name for this: Emotional Intelligence. But the rest of us probably call it good-old-fashioned people skills. It’s the ability to manage one’s own emotions, and the emotions of others, to achieve certain goals. In this case, it’s business-centric goals such as problem solving, being flexible and focused, taking initiative, fitting into a company’s culture among many others. Hard skills, such as programming knowledge, are essential to success in today’s business world. But those skills will launch a career like a lead balloon if they are not surrounded by soft skills to elevate their potential and click them effectively into a company’s work processes, structure and team.
#2 Team Skills
Speaking of teams, rare is the product that goes to market by the single effort of an individual. The reason soft skills are so important is that these skills enable a team to work together to remove roadblocks on the path to product development and to unify in achieving the common goals of the business. Soft skills that relate directly to team building include the ability to coach co-workers, the ability to offer an opinion while still listening and absorbing feedback and the ability to evaluate work processes with an eye toward improving performance and efficiency.
#3 Cloud Skills
If you’re reading this, then you agree that cloud skills are important, because it is those skills that most likely brought this post to whatever device you’re reading it on. Hosted web application development is the now the standard, with 95% of companies in a recent survey utilizing the cloud in some form in 2016. If you want to get hired to do development work in the 21st century, you’re going to need to work with the cloud.
#4 Programming Skills
While cloud skills are primarily required for IT or software development work, almost every job today will require some basic level of programming skills. As we have discussed, technology is now hardwired into almost everything we do. Even if you’re trying to land a marketing job, a basic knowledge of coding will serve you well and demonstrate the well-rounded background that employers now demand.
Obtaining these programming skills is not as hard as you may think. A coding bootcamp can take someone from a non-tech background and get them coding effectively in as little as 12 weeks. The secret is finding a program that fully immerses students into the world of software engineering, supported by the right mentors and structure to unleash the hidden developer in all of us.
Adding these 4 skills to your toolbelt is like lighting a flare in the sea of other job applicants. Potential employers will be drawn to the shining glow of your potential, and you will be prepared with a background to tackle any challenges that might arise in your new dream job.
