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Amidst the hustle to restore prominence in the global economy in the post-Covid era, there’s good news for Indian job market. According to the data published by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), India’s unemployment rate in June fell to 11 per cent. 

‘Indeed India’ analytics show that hiring in India hasn’t been poor during lockdown. While software technology, medical profession and marketing experienced a surge in job postings, there was a decline in childcare, food preparation, and hospitality and tourism sectors. Also, the automobile sector is reviving – there was only a single digit decline of just over 1 per cent in passenger car wholesales in July-August 2020. Furthermore, there’s a prediction of 10-15 per cent IT-BPM hiring increase and steady spends in digital banking, both positively impacting India’s IT sector. 

The trends suggest that the 18.9 million employees that lost jobs during lockdown can see hope. In fact, employment in public and organised private sectors is projected to trend around 3.2 billion in 2021, according to Trading Economics. Exhaustively, employers are looking for the following skills:

Emotional intelligence

There were times when everyone felt uncertain about their job and the future of their businesses. This called for the need to connect with people on an emotional level. Organisations would go all out to have individuals with a strong ability to be aware of their and others’ emotions and express the same with compassion. 

Creativity & innovation

The ingenuity of individuals blinked brightest on the radars of leaders, looking for solutions to keep businesses running. This skill will remain in my top 5 for a long time to come.  

Adaptability to leadership

We observed a pattern of leaders breaking down tasks and re-assigning decision-making to speed up work. As a result, people now want to take the lead at different times. Hence, individuals with strong leadership skills, like the ability to leverage resources, encourage collaboration and demonstrate emotional resilience, will be in demand. 

Adaptability

Covid-19 impacted the world in ways that we didn’t expect. Patterns like more remote working, better self and employee care, virtual collaboration and compassion have become more prominent than ever. Hence, we need individuals with the ability to adapt by showing courage and flexibility to break traditional patterns and take risks to do things differently. 

Data literacy 

In an already digitally connected world of work, remote working and virtual collaboration has opened the data floodgates. People with skills to analyze the overflowing data and help leaders make informed decisions about the future will be in high demand. 

Balancing the rope 

Working from home has opened up an unchartered territory for many employees and employers; especially for those who had not caught on much with the best remote working practices. Hence, an important skill of the future will be the individual’s ability to separate personal priorities from work to ensure safety of confidential work data and, of course, socializing a lot more with peers through facetime interactions.  

Openness to learning

Dynamics of jobs are rapidly changing, and the jobs that were lost during Covid may no longer be relevant or available in the post-Covid era. Therefore, individuals need the skills to upgrade or learn something new and relevant, if they are willing to stay in the job market or (re)enter it. 

A complete economic recovery will happen gradually. Meanwhile, the best that employees can do to prepare is to upskill and reskill, while business need to assess the skills that they need at work to catapult into the future.