Women & Leadership Australia eNewsletter

October 2009

How to get promoted without the skills

Employers are increasingly looking for workers whose skills go beyond the basics. Developing your management and people skills can give you a serious edge.

Hands up who’s written ‘Knows how to use a keyboard’ on their resume in the last ten years?

I doubt anyone. That’s because for at least a decade now, no one cares about basic IT skills. In fact, most employers presume that you’ve got the basics, plus a little more besides.

Even as IT reaches into everything from social networking to mobile communications, most employees are expected to be at least familiar with how it might impact on their job.

We’re also expected to bring to the workplace the particular skills of our own profession.

This package of technical skills can quickly become something of a burden, especially when you consider that skills often need regular updating and re-training.

Getting non-technical

There is, though, an area of skills that HR managers and employers are increasingly seeking. And it’s something that need not necessarily make it harder to land a new job or promotion. In fact, if you use it right, it can work to your advantage.

In parallel with areas of emphasis such as Emotional Intelligence, employers are increasingly looking for non-technical skills, especially when it comes to management roles.

The rationale is simple. It’s easier to train someone in technical skills than the more intangible non-technical ones.

It’s a learning that has been borne out of plenty of mistakes. Most of us have been around when someone technically skilled gets a promotion despite having the interpersonal skills of a brick.

Instead of rewarding technical geniuses in other ways, the prevailing decision has been to actually remove them from what they do best and put them behind a desk.

Poor judgements like these have not only infuriated those in the firing line of these new line managers who really ought to have stayed put. It’s also had a latent effect on business bottom line.

Managers who lack the skills in managing people can – whether intentionally or otherwise – wreck havoc on their departments. Morale drops, turnover increases, productivity falls.

A broader management perspective

Employers are realising that they need to stop two things from happening. On one side of the equation, they need to stop technical experts from accidentally ‘falling’ into management roles.

On the other hand, they need to stop people with good management skills from slipping through their fingers, even if they don’t have top-notch technical expertise.

The difficulty with non-technical skills is that they can be very broad. More so, they are less quantifiable and measurable.

The good news is that they are transferable across every industry and sector. Further, whilst they are partly based on one’s own personal style, non-technical skills can be taught.

Attaining a broader management perspective can be achieved on a number of fronts.

Whilst much can be said for hands-on experience, unstructured learning can take place through coaching and third-party consultants. Role-playing and team exercises can be effective ways of developing non-technical skills in listening, giving and receiving feedback, self-awareness and emotional intelligence.

Mentors can prove influential in the development of more subtle and advanced non-technical skills. A common weakness in management is striking the balance in directing team players. Giving too much direction can easily turn into micro-managing. Giving too little can leave employees feeling lost and isolated.

More tangible skills can be taught with more traditional and formal means. These include time and project management, negotiating, basic accounting, setting budgets, reporting and conflict management.

The bottom line is that there is wide scope for using non-technical skills to your advantage.

The trick is refining them as best you can, then promoting them as loudly as possible. The good news is that increasingly, someone’s prepared to listen.

October 2009 eNewsletter survey:

Which of the following areas is most important to effectively managing other people: technical or non-technical skills?

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