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Essential Thinking & Analytical Skills to Stand Out of the Crowd

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Most of employers mainly focus on hard skills relevant to the job roles, including candidates’ education, technical skill, experience in the domain, and maybe accomplishments. However, they fail to evaluate the candidate on analytical & thinking abilities which actually drive all the remaining hard skills of any candidate. As these thinking & analytical skill are a bit less tangible these are considered to be soft skills as they are more intuitive and difficult to demonstrate or quantify or even evaluate. Hence most of the larger organizations try to gauge these skills by core competency exams based on different scenarios with which they try to evaluate candidates thinking and analytical abilities. Unfortunately, we are not properly trained on these skills in any of the educational entities directly, even if they are included in the training like entrance exams in IIT’S, IIM’S, etc., the focus of these training is to clear the examinations with gauged with ranks.

However, these skills are very essential for our day-to-day life and most importantly for career progress. It’s very important for every one of us to focus on these skills to learn and practice them constantly as we do to improve our hard skills. The soft skill which helps us in multiplying the impact of our hard skills here is a list of a dozen of the most important for an employee to stand out of the crowd.

Critical Thinking

This skill is very essential to look at any problem or situation and formulate an understanding of how and why the problem exists. Anyone who builds this ability to understand the full scope of the problem can make or implement a better view of the scenario with foresight & attention to detail and come up with better decision-making in order to develop effective solutions. Critical thinking is the topmost required skill and the demand for this skill is growing. We can work on Improving Critical Thinking with Why Not? the framework discussed in this article. You can also read more about Critical Thinking.

Curiosity & Ability to frame better Questions

Why do we do what we do? Why are things the way they are? A curious nature and a desire to dig deeper are essential tools for everyone to solve problems. With curiosity & abilities to ask better and more meaningful questions, we involve ourselves in analyzing and interpreting the information. You can’t make sound data or information-based decisions until you actually find reasonable, foolproof, and unbiased data or information about the problem. With curiosity, we can improve the ability to ask a better questions which can directly route us towards a solution to the problem. Thus, the ability to uncover and interpreted the information and data available through trustworthy sources is highly essential. Improve your curiosity to learn how can you improve better question-framing skills with this free video collection course.

Tenacity & Persistence

Not all problems are straightforward and visible to the naked eye. Many times we need to dig deeper into the problem to find the root cause. Most of the time the situations or the challenges are with interdependent multiple layers which define the complexity of the problem. To deal with these kinds of problems in our career or personal lives we should improve Tenacity and Persistence to be able to work towards the solutions. This is very important to understand and hard to practice these skills as most people are easily losing interest or tired and quit trying to work towards the solution. So, strong analytical skills mean seeing beyond one issue at a time to develop a more cohesive view of a problem’s complexity. Try to learn more about these kinds of skills here Life Lessons for Overall Personality Development, Psychology Lessons to Build Growth Mindset

Effective Communication & Presentation Skills

Effective communication is a fine art, and it’s one that successful data scientists refine throughout their careers. Because they often communicate essential information to executives and stakeholders, they must be confident about the data they present and relay it in terms that the layman can understand. You can create the best actionable solutions anyone has ever seen in the history of IT. Still, unless you can relay that information to the people in charge, those solutions won’t go anywhere. Learn more about these skills with our free video collection library on Communication & Persuasion Skills, Soft-Skills & Strategies for Entrepreneurs.

The Ability to Communicate the Big Picture

Most of the time we fail to see or even imagine the bigger picture. Seeing the bigger picture is not easy as it is different for different people. This only comes with constant engagement with the domain knowledge and continuous learning. Most of us don’t even take time to think bigger than what we are doing. We can simply start by understanding how our daily actions will impact our future. Trying to understand and imagine this aspect will give you a bigger picture of how your future is going to be. Similarly when we are dealing with a problem understanding the overall problem can take time, but having a better view of the problem will help us understand the complexities and interdependabilities in the system. This will help us to get a better solution mechanism instead of just fixing individual aspects of the problems separately. This means we should be open to new information and new perspectives so that we can understand the bigger picture. Brain Re-programming a video collection can help you understand how our world and our brain works which will be a sneak peek to understand and learn the ability to see the bigger picture. One of my favorite questions is “How big is big for you?” which makes me think again and again about how big is big for me.

Business Sense

A very essential skill to make sure we are making ourselves resourceful every day by learning about how the business world works. Having a better business sense will help us to build better investment and decision-making habits to increase our capability of creating wealth. Not everyone has clarity of how the world works, how money works, and how can we create wealth. To learn more about this business sense you should also have better personal finance knowledge. Learn everything about wealth with our free video collection course: The Science of Wealth – Lessons of personal finance. An understanding of Business sense will help you see things from a different perspective and try a new angle of ability to monetize your skills, abilities, and creations.

Working on these skills is absolutely crucial and most of the time to develop these skills many of us need a handholding of mentors. UpSkillShare is a social learning platform helping users to focus on improving their soft skills with free curated videos collection library and paid courses. Every piece of content and course is designed to help you become a better thinking and a better decision-maker than before by contently focusing on positive re-enforcement by avoiding social media noise and be connected with co-learners. Create your social learning journal account at www.upskillshare.com and start sharing your learning and practicing efforts every day and be in contact with positive content which can help you think and grow.

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