There comes a time in almost every individual’s life when their career does not offer any scope of growth, either professionally or personally. They may have had a good run initially, but after a while, lack of progress sets in, and the thought of discovering new avenues takes over their mind. However, in today’s competitive market, finding a job that best suits your talent can seem like a daunting task. With most employers now looking for candidates with very specific skillsets, being good at just core job skills is not good enough to get selected for a role of your choice anymore. Thus, if you’re looking to change your job or explore different options, there are a number of additional skills that you need to have or inculcate to improve your chances of getting selected:

Emotional intelligence:

Although you might be an extremely smart person with IQ scores off the charts, your emotional quotient is just as important. These days, HRs tend to look at how well you would work with others in your team before hiring you rather than just make a decision based on your job skills.

Candidates possessing high EQ possess several strong traits, including —high productivity, using humour as a strategy, team players, excellent problem solvers, and last but not the least, good conversationalists. To improve your EQ, start with recognising your emotions, and observe your actions based on the way you feel in different situations.

It is also advisable to focus more on your positive traits as it can help boost your confidence, and motivate you to work harder, and as a result become a better professional.

Communication skills:

Despite being one of the most common traits employers look for in a candidate, effective communication, as a skill, is often overlooked by most job seekers as they feel it is not as important as other technical abilities.

However, they soon realise its importance when they are seeking new jobs, and face rejection because they lack this small yet significant detail in their skillset.

Communication is not just about being able to talk to a crowd or a room full of people. You need to be effective in communicating with your team, and make/give effective presentations no matter what your job role is. Every recruiter would prefer a candidate with great communication skills, and hence, candidates should make it a priority to hone their ability to communicate well.

Knowing how to learn:

Even though it is great to have the particular skills for the job you are applying to, it is also important to know how to learn and teach yourself new skills with no external support. Nowadays, some job skills have a tendency to become irrelevant or obsolete very quickly. You need to be able to improvise and be a quick learner in order to stay au courant with the latest skills required for specific job roles.

Time management:

Effective time management is a skill that every individual should possess. Every job seeker should know how to prioritise their work, and get things done before deadline. They also need to be able to strike work-life balance to avoid burning out and become less efficient.

Remember, a person who can give long hours to the company is not always favourable to the company. They need to know that whatever time you invest in your work is being managed well.

You can also adopt some small habits like reducing clutter, avoiding distractions, taking notes, and developing action plans in order to effectively manage your time.

Feedback:

In any organisation, giving and receiving quality feedback both to and from an employee is important to ensure that they are adding value to the company.

If you’re going to join at a managerial level, you need to be able to both give and take feedback while those applying for executive job roles need to be good at taking feedback and adapting quickly.

Apart from making communication more open, good feedback also helps both companies and employees to map each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

The writer is co-founder and chief executive officer, hunarr.co.in.