Why and How to develop a new skill?

This financial year started with a bang that leading tech companies like Infosys, Tech Mahindra, TCS, and lots of others announced that they'd be reskilling their present workforce on new skills and consistently remove outdated skills.

Reskilling is an important strategy for today's companies to enhance talent, become competent in the market, become proactive and new newer technologies to be relevant to the changing times. 

The world is changing so is the requirement of competencies in people to get the work done through the skills. Businesses are trying to be smarter, sharper and fiercer than ever before. That's why skills are important and so is the ability to learn new things quickly. 

If people don't move forward, they stay outdated and eventually become unemployed and will be an NPA - Non-Performing Asset. These tech companies have also announced pink slips to their employees too, the reason being unproductive, not adding value, outdated skills, and giving the least performance at the workplace. 

Every industry is going through disruption, and disruption is always caused by something which is way better what is present. AI and Automation are eating up monotonous tasks and companies are preferring such tasks in order to save costs. 

But the question is how to be relevant to the present scenario? The answer is simple, develop new skills. 

This can also be known as upskilling or upgrading skills too. 

Many of us argue as to how much we have learned or study in education we have completed, not enough?

Yes, it is not at all enough. Education is completed for the sake of the eligibility criteria for applying for jobs and just working knowledge is attained through this but not expertise.

The times have changed now, presently specialized education is in high demand. Specialized education is which has a single topic to focus on in-depth. 

Skills need to be developed, as fast as possible and need to be implemented to increase productivity. 

In this blog, we'll talk about how to develop skills and gain an upper hand in becoming an expert in that particular skill. 

When we google for knowing what is Skill, it returns back saying "Ability to do something well"

When we say the ability to do something well it means exceptionally well, and using it in every way possible to make the use of it.

Why do we develop skills? Is it for ourselves to prepare for the future or else because of fear about the future?

There's a difference between both the approach. One is where you enjoy and create your own environment of possibilities and enjoy your own development and in another case you develop a new skills only because of the fear that your skills don't get depleted or demands.

Let's make ourselves clear the idea of becoming an expert in a skill is extensively working on it.  For example, we use our mobiles so extensively that we become an expert in using our phones where the other person may not be able to use it the same way as you use it. Another case is that experience your route from work to home you travel every day on it and over a period of time you become an expert on it, so much so that you are able to analyze the route, the most traffic sites, where could be a smooth road and at what time, the pulse of route and what. That same is the case with becoming an expert in an skill too.

Remember the scene from Dr Strange, where strange asks Th Ancient One about to how to become a master or expert of the mystic arts, Th Ancient One answers strange with a question saying "How did you become a world-class neurosurgeon?" to which strange answers " Study and Practice years of it" Ancient One replies saying "Perhaps that's the only way".

There no other way than hard work, practice, and experience that's the only way in developing a new skill. Work on it, practice it everywhere possible and learn from the experiences, the mistakes and results.

In the engineering world, do you know why coders are valued so much? Because they don't have a definite way of learning a new language neither proper resources, all they have is proper knowledge of basics of the coding language. That's why the world's best coders are self-taught on the basis of their own imagination, creativity, problem identification and investing every other possible thing to achieve that specific thing and they nail it. So much so that they change the way the world would potentially experience the present reality.

Indeed skills are important than formal education, that's where our education system fails to understand this which is why most of us get stranded confused because we walked upon a path which others showed us and when those people go away we are lost. That's why building your own path

would be the best favor you'd ever do it for yourself.

Start now, build skills and become an expert. As Jack Ma said, build a skill to master it and when you retire leverage your learnings to young people. That's why skill up, there no other way.