Thoughts on keys to career success post 2019

Some thoughts about what skills are becoming more valuable:

• The best jobs are getting more cross-functional: know business, marketing, product, design, stats, AI. You don’t need to know all at expert levels, but being ignorant stops you from delivering.

• Technical ability. Not everyone needs to be a developer, but the ability to think and read in code is key to delivering good work. Writing is a bonus, but I think many roles will increasingly benefit from writing “basic” HTML / CSS / Markdown, SQL, python, and Javascript.

• AI - knowing enough about stats and machine learning to know how to structure a problem, pitfalls, and enablers. Knowing a problem is a bad fit (not enough data to predict) is a good start.

• Knowing a technical skill, and bringing to it knowledge of sales, relationship management, storytelling, and /or business strategy, is a compelling combo.

• To the point above, as much automation as there is today, enterprise and consumer business both are ultimately serving and selling to a person. Being able to understand that person’s needs, and persuade them, is a key skill. On the receiving end of enterprise sales, there are not enough people with a great combo of technical depth and sales depth to go around.