Have you ever wondered how to stay relevant in this ever changing world we live in? There are no doubt skills in which are innate to us and others that need to be strengthened and even learned. The good news is, you don’t have to jump into an entire new career to spark a new passion or create a transferable skill.
- Budget Management
Get your hot little hands on any budget you can find, no matter how small, and take responsibility for it. Manage how the funds are dispensed, keep control of the budget, and learn what fiscal control is all about. - Supervising
Take responsibility for the work of others in a situation in which some accountability is called for. Have direct contact with the work of others; expose yourself to the difficulty of giving orders, delegating tasks, taking guff, understanding the other person’s viewpoint. Here is where listening can become a real feat of skill. - Public Relations
Accept a role in which you must meet or relate to the public. Greet visitors, answer phone complaints, give talks to community groups, sell ads to business people, explain programs to prospective clients, or even collect taxes. - Coping with Deadline Pressure
Search for opportunities to demonstrate that you can produce good work when it is required by external deadlines. Prove to yourself and to anyone else that you can function on someone else’s schedule, even when that timeframe is notably hurried. - Negotiating/Arbitrating
Discover and cultivate the fine art of dealing openly and effectively with people in ambiguous situations. Learn how to bring warring factions together, resolve differences between groups or individuals and make demands on behalf of one constituency to those positions of power. - Speaking
Take a leadership role in any organization so that you are forced to talk publicly, prepare remarks, get across ideas, and even motivate people without feeling terribly self-conscious. Good public speaking is little more than the art of dramatized conversation, but it must be practiced so you can discover your own personal style. - Writing
Go public with your writing skills, or even the lack of them. There is nothing quite so energizing as seeing your own works in print. Exhilarating if they look good to you and a spurt of improvement if they look awful. Practice putting pen to paper. Write letters to the editors of every publication you read routinely. Write a newsletter, however informal, for a club or organization to which you belong. - Organizing/Managing/Coordinating
Take charge of an event that is within your grasp; it doesn’t matter what you organize, a church supper, a parade in honor of your town’s one hundredth birthday – as long as you have responsibility for bringing together people, resources, and events. If nothing else, the headaches of organizing events or managing projects teach you how to delegate tasks to others. - Interviewing
Learn to acquire information from other people by questioning them directly. Start by interviewing the neighbors, your friends and other people easily available. It doesn’t matter what you ask them, but imagine you are a newspaper reporter who needs the information for a story. Discover the fine art of helping a person to feel comfortable in your presence, even though you are asking difficult or even touchy questions. - Teaching/Instructing
Refine your ability to explain things to other people. Since most teaching takes place not in the classroom, but in ordinary everyday exchanges between people, you should become familiar and comfortable with passing information and projecting understanding to others. Any position of leadership or responsibility involves training others to some extent.
