With the rise of artificial intelligence and automation, the skills once needed in the workplace are becoming redundant. For any graduate, the prospect of facing the competitive job market is daunting enough let alone in today’s transitioning environment. So how can professors better prepare their marketing students to face this uncertainty?
A mixture of both soft and hard skills will be essential to thrive in the digital workplace, a with a focus on the ‘human skills’ that can’t be automated. Here, we’ve compiled a list of the top skills students will need to stand out from the crowd.
Creativity
One of the top skills listed by Forbes, creativity is a soft skill that’s highly valuable and irreplaceable by robots. Regardless of their profession, students will benefit greatly if they can demonstrate an ability to be unique, imaginative and proactive in coming up with new ideas. Essentially, creativity and innovation are exactly what helps organizations and marketers move ahead of the competition and achieve organizational success.
Critical thinking
The ability to think clearly and rationally is essential for any profession. From analysing information to providing logical reasoning and evaluation, critical thinking will help students solve problems and seek sources of information to better inform themselves.
Students won’t be able to learn these skills through traditional means such as textbooks, instead they will need to be given the opportunity to practice these skills through experiential learning with business simulations and real-world practice.
Strategic thinking
Strategic thinking is critical for developing a clearly defined and focused business vision. It sets the foundation to any successful marketing initiative and without strategy those activities can be meaningless. Failing to have a strategy is one of the most common mistakes students make.
To best prepare students for the future workplace, professors will need to blend strategy with execution.