Maria Ion, HPDI: “By 2025, 50 percent of worldwide population will need some sort of reskilling”

“The emotional part of belonging is not something that we can track with precise numbers and figures. But we need to ensure that it’s a feeling our teams and ourselves have it. We need to feel we belong in the organization to create authentic initiatives for our colleagues.

Every year we hear the need of learning new skills. Data says that by 2025, 50 percent of worldwide population will need some sort of reskilling, learning, or unlearning some skills,” Maria Ion, Marketing Manager, HPDI said during “Belonging at Work Conference” powered by The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“The top skill is learning agility. What I actually don’t like about this idea of top skills is that it’s only the tip of the iceberg and what’s beneath it’s equally important.

For example, behind learning agility we have four distinct types of agilities that need to be developed to achieve learning agility, namely mental agility, people agility, results agility and self-awareness.

If learning agility is when you know what to do and don’t know what to do, adaptability is actually using the information that you have and apply it to different situations. So, adaptability would be the second skill that is highly searched these days and it’s actually the top of what employers are searching in interviews these days as far as we know.

After that I would mention digital literacy which is knowing how to handle all these digital tools that we have around us. In Romania we say that the shortest road is the one you already know. Well, digital is changing this. There is for sure a smarter and a faster way to do your job by using the tools we have today.

The last one on the skill list is having an organized mind. We have so much information around us these days that we need a skill to sort it, to understand it and to translate it to our teams in a really simple way.

Only 8 percent of companies offer adaptability trainings. When we learn we need a mix of methods. We need 10 percent of theory, 20 percent of shadowing or mentoring, and only the rest is learning as we go.

The problem with integrating agility and adaptability in the Romanian culture in the last 10 years was only the focus on learn as you go which puts a lot of pressure on our shoulders.”

Click here for the event recording.