Do General or Technical Skills Count More for Your Tech Career?

General vs Technical: Which Skill Set Is More Important for Your Tech Career?

Technology is fluid by nature. The march of progress doesn’t stop – from steam engines to autonomous cars, from mechanical processors to microchips, from tape computers to smartphones, from telegraphs to the internet – and everything else, including biotech, artificial intelligence, quantum hardware and space exploration. It is difficult to grasp just how much the world has changed until we look back at our lives but a decade ago.

VLADYSLAV KOSHELYEV

Member, SCS Product Marketing Lead, Meta Founder, The Koshelyev Company

Yet for someone working in tech, this constant change poses a major challenge – there simply isn’t any skill that we can learn once and keep for life. Whereas professionals in other industries can gradually build on the knowledge acquired in school throughout their careers, much of technical knowledge becomes obsolete and requires a refresh rather soon for a tech professional. What is then the secret of a successful career for a technologist?

HOW TO TELL WHAT’S WHAT

It helps to think about skills in terms of General and Technical abilities. General skills usually remain relevant regardless of technology developments. In tech, “hard” skills such as programming and engineering are often seen as the most important qualities to have. However, the subtler “soft” skills are just as critical. In fact, the faster the tech stack evolves, the more essential the ability to think critically, communicate effectively and work well with others becomes.

Notably, many prominent technology thought leaders in recent decades embody a powerful combination of system thinking, commercial intuition, a knack for communicating complex ideas to people from different backgrounds, as well as empathy and vision of how a specific product can fit into consumers’ lives.

GENERAL SKILLS CREATE A BASE FOR TECHNICAL SKILLS

Indeed, general skills create a solid base for building deeper technical competencies such as coding, data analytics, hardware design, biology, rocket propulsion and others, which need to be constantly updated to keep up with the speed science evolves.

The level of technical knowledge required will of course be dependent on the nature of work. A software engineer building complex machine learning algorithms needs a deeper level of technical understanding compared to a product manager. Everyone, however, will need to hone their evergreen general abilities while finding a way to keep their hard skills always updated and relevant.

THE MOST IMPORTANT GENERAL SKILL OF ALL

Given how rapidly technology is evolving, possibly the most important meta-skill in our industry is – learning. As the ground is constantly shifting under our feet, the capacity to quickly deconstruct complex technical information and learn key concepts required for tasks at any given moment is a real superpower. Learning how to learn effectively is the best investment we can make for our careers.

AD