 |
|
|
|||||
In summer 2019, Bob McDonough took a full stack web development coding bootcamp at the University of Pennsylvania. An English-turned-telecommunications major in college, McDonough had been working at a bar while sending out job applications for positions he barely wanted. Most paid below $50,000 a year, an undesirable salary for a 27-year-old in Philadelphia. McDonough says his degree really wasn’t doing it for him. So, I figured I’d add a certificate to stack my résumé, he says. What McDonough was doing was upskillingthe practice of learning new skills or sharpening old ones to attain maximum desirability in the job market. While taking this web dev course, McDonough wasnt sure it would be worth the time and cost. But by the end, he had a polished portfolio, he says, a filled-out GitHub and new skills added on LinkedIn. Within three months of completing the course, McDonough had a salaried job at a design studio. Someone saw my profile and gave me a call pretty quickly, he says. But hes not sure job seekers could replicate his experience today. The skillsets deemed desirable seem to be shifting faster than ever, and job seekers are reporting dismal experiences on the market. In the 2010s, “upskilling” may have just meant enrolling in a coding academy and hoping for the best. But fast, seismic changes like the rise of AI have quickly made a path to professional staying power much murkier. Ten years ago, completing a certificate might have been enough to land a role in high-demand fields, says Nora Gardner, senior partner at McKinsey. The days of taking a General Assembly course and landing a plum coding job may be gone. In this Premium story, youll learn: Hear from workers who upskilledand whether or not it led to new jobs Learn out-of-the-box ways to make yourself desirable beyond “learn Python” What employers are actually looking for, beyond certifications on LinkedIn The uncertainty surrounding AI is immense, and the job market continues to be rough: In an August survey by the New York Federal Reserve, participants reported a new low of 44.9% likelihood of finding a new job should they lose theirs. On top of that, research from the McKinsey Global Institute suggests around 10% of American workers may need to switch jobs by 2030. But 45% of employed survey respondents said that their need for more or different work experience, relevant skills, credentials, or education was the top barrier to finding a new job. And yet, the way to upskill effectively doesnt resemble the path McDonough took just a few years back. But that doesnt mean upskilling courses are obsolete. Combined with continued on-the-job development, the dedication can communicate to employers the soft skills it takes to succeed in a rapidly evolving workforce: adaptability, willingness to learn, and resilience. Mixed messages Multiple sources told Fast Company that employers are emphasizing experience over specific skillsets. But learning the latest tech in the workforce goes a long way. Diana Rocha, 37, a London-based product manager at predictive hiring company Applied, took a DeepLearning AI course on Coursera a few months ago. Then she went to Workeraa site where people can test their upskilled skillsand tested in the 75th percentile. She put that all on her LinkedIn in August, a quiet month professionally in London, but immediately saw at least two to three companies or recruiters reaching out to her per week, compared to the previous one to two per month, she says. Rocha originally got her Applied job by upskilling, too, via a masters program and Coursera courses on behavioral economics. However, Rocha isnt sure the recruiters recently reaching out on LinkedIn were only attracted to her new AI prowess. LinkedIn also shows her years of product management roles. Rocha says employers who contacted her were looking for that alongside the newer AI skills, so its unclear if upskilling truly led to the spike in recruiter interest. However, McKinseys Gardner says its the mix of both existing and upskilled experience that will most likely get candidates seen. If youve worked in your field for decades, certifications can signal commitment to learning, she says. But the differentiator is how theyre put into practice. Applying AI tools to improve workflow efficiency demonstrates adaptability in a way a credential alone cannot. Easier than you think? Today, McDonough has a new job, coordinating web content at a law firm. But his experience from the design role he landed via upskilling taught him to stay on top of the latest technology. He says he scouts YouTube and Reddit to see what people are talking about, he says. If I click on something that has 300 comments, then I know Im probably in the right spot. Learning while on the job is key to useful upskilling. While Molly Johnson-Jones, CEO and cofounder of job search platform Flexa, says organizations hawking upskilling courses often sell a dream, she adds that workers looking to switch careers can start doing so within their current company. Johnson-Jones says to identify what bits of your role could seep into moving towards that new role. Say you want to transition from marketing into tech: Find ways to collaborate more with your companys tech team, she suggests. Get to know the department leads. Doing that relies on soft skills: empathy, interpersonal awareness, and emotional intelligence that make workers effective collaborators and pleasant to be around. Were told these are the skills that AI will never snatch away from humans. Are those things even upskillable, though? Lisa Lie, founder of microlearning app Learna, thinks so. Her company provides 10-minute-or-less lessons on skills like boosting confidence, thinking differently, and working with anyone. Run by experts like psychologists and performance coaches, each short lesson begins by setting out a problem, followed by the expert walking users through the best language to use to diffuse a contentious situation with a coworker, for example. Lie doesnt call them soft skills, because they’re not optional or easy, she says. If AI is taking care of repeatable tasks, the value of people skills just went up. ‘You have to stay on top of it’ Upskilling can feel like throwing yet another stressor atop the existing mountain of stress that comes with being a working rofessional. But Gen Z appears ready to meet this future. Per Flexas Work Index study, which looked at more than 40,000 job posts and almost 30,000 job seekers, members of Gen Z are 68% more likely than older generations to prioritize personal development in their job search. Though millennials, both McDonough and Rocha have adopted this approach. Based on their own experiences landing new jobs as a direct result of upskillingit does seem to work. And if the youngest workers are prioritizing upskilling, it may well be the future. The tech moves so quickly, McDonough says. Instead of just taking a course like he did in 2019, he suggests job seekers looking to upskill today stay up to date, read, [and] listen to podcasts on what people are doing. The AI hype is going to calm down at some point, says Rocha. And yet? I wouldnt like to be left out because I didnt upskill on that front. McDonough agrees. AI might be todays hottest thing, but company executives are always reading about the latest trends, tech, and shifts, deciding what skills to hire for. You have to stay on top of it, he says, or else youll fall behind.
Category:
E-Commerce
Below, Joe Nucci shares five key insights from his new book, Psychobabble: Viral Mental Health Myths & the Truths to Set You Free. Joe Nucci is a licensed psychotherapist. As a content creator, he contextualizes mental health misinformation. His videos at @joenuccitherapy reached over 10 million people in the first six months of posting and his writing can be found in his newsletter, Psychobabble. Whats the big idea? Psychobabble replaces mental health misconceptions with liberating truths that can help readers avoid misinformation, navigate important debates in the mental health field, and better maneuver their own therapy journeys. The problem is not that therapy has gone mainstream, but that some of the assumptions we have absorbed from therapy culture are actually holding us back from healing, growing, and solving our problems. 1. Psychotherapy heals mental illness, not problems of living. Therapy works, but it doesnt work for everything. Somewhere along the way, as mental health got destigmatized, we started to believe we could apply therapy to more than just mental illness. We started to believe it could save us from more than depression, trauma, and addiction. We started to believe that it could make us the ideal partner, the perfect parent, or help us achieve profound psychological comfort in all aspects of life. Unfortunately, there is no pill and no therapeutic intervention that can erase all of lifes struggles. And yet, therapy is often marketed as a cure-all for anything life throws at you. Of course, theres nothing wrong with going to therapy to vent or if youre bored or lonely. Furthermore, therapy can be quite effective in helping you with subclinical or nondiagnostic problems, like dating issues or struggles with a life transition. But there is a big difference between needing therapy and being able to benefit from it. Knowing where that line is can be really helpful in terms of maximizing how to get the most benefit from your therapy journey. It makes you a smarter consumer of therapy services and better at navigating self-help misinformation. Maybe you need to go to therapy, or maybe the answer to your problem can be found elsewhere. If youre not sure, speaking to a qualified therapist can help you figure that out. 2. Mental health is about agency, not identity. One of the dangers of therapy culture going viral is that mental health has become a form of identity and social currency. In certain places, mental health has become popularized. People collect labels like badges, flaunting their self-awareness: I am anxiously attached. I am neurodivergent. I am an empath. In the book, I share a patients story that is all too common. She could articulate every piece of her psychological history. She was practiced at naming her emotions and fluent in therapy-speak. But she wasnt changing. She wasnt healing. She was stuck and suffering from it. She didnt need more self-awareness. While becoming self-aware is often the first step, the magic of therapy isnt about the analysis; its about translating that insight into action. It is about having hard conversations, naming her needs, and making the call shed been avoiding for weeks. Diagnosis is a doorway, not a destination. Mental health shouldnt be about figuring out what you are. Its about being able to transform your attachment style, optimizing your life around your neurodivergency, or harnessing your empathy in an adaptive way. Its about building your capacity to be better. Diagnosis is a doorway, not a destination. A diagnosis is useful in the sense that it informs a treatment plan. Holding onto your diagnosis as an identity without building the capacity for agency is just taking extra steps to stay exactly where you are in life. That is not the promise of the mental health field. The promise is to transform what you can and accept the rest as problems of living. 3. Therapists are not value-neutral. Therapists are taught to be nonjudgmental, but nonjudgmental doesnt mean value-free. Every therapist brings a worldview into the room. They have their own pasts, politics, and values. A bad therapist will pretend that they are perfectly neutral. This kind of therapist is blissfully unaware of how their own personal lives impact the work you are trying to accomplish in the session. A good therapist will be aware that they are not a blank slate. They are self-aware enough to consider how they might say something thats more about them than about you or why you are seeking their help. They will withhold sharing when its not clinically appropriate. But a great therapist? A great therapist can be simultaneously aware of how their past or personal values might influence them while honoring that your past and life philosophies may differ. They may even talk about their differences to assist in your healing. A good therapist will be aware that they are not a blank slate. The unfortunate truth is that some therapists feel emboldened to let their personal worldview encroach on their patients worldview. Some therapists see themselves as activists advancing a certain agenda. It could be political or philosophical. It might mean encouraging a client to end a relationship, label a parent as toxic, or reframe social dynamics as systemic harm. Sometimes thats warranted. But sometimes its projection. 4. Tragedies dont always result in trauma. Trauma is real, but so is the casual misuse of the term. Not everything bad that happens to you is a trauma. Its inaccurate to say that events are traumatic in themselves because two people can get into the same car accident and one will develop PTSD while the other one will not. A trauma response is not about the past. Its about the present moment and your current relationship to the thing that happened to you. Sometimes, pain metabolizes naturally. Sometimes, people move forward without assigning their suffering a trauma diagnosis. And thats not repressionits capacity. By insisting that everyone has trauma, we risk flattening a wide range of emotional experiences into one narrow framework. We must consider the dynamics of grief, growth, and the full range of negative human experiences that shape our lives. Disappointment, regret, embarrassment, and heartbreak are hard, but they are not necessarily traumatic. Calling them trauma can subtly reinforce the idea that we are fragile and need clinical intervention to process every difficulty. This rebranding is surely good for therapists who want a steady stream of patients, but the idea culturally undermines resilience and turns the lens inward in ways that are often disempowering. 5. Therapy-speak can be medicine, or a weapon. One of the best things about therapy is that sometimes, when you name omethingwhen something becomes conscious through languagethat thing no longer has power over you. Ive seen firsthand how being able to name trauma or abuse can provide relief almost instantly. Ive personally experienced the agency Ive gained from being able to articulate a dynamic that was previously ineffable. But if language can heal us, it can also hurt us: A patient once said, Im drawing a boundary, right after cutting off a friend without explanation. Was it a boundary? Or was it a way to avoid a hard conversation? He gaslit me sometimes means He disagreed with me. Im dysregulated becomes shorthand for I dont want to talk about this. We think were speaking the language of healing. Sometimes, were just dressing up our defenses. Sometimes, using psychology jargon is just a logical fallacyan appeal to authority. When we do this in a way that allows us to be more disconnected from ourselves and from each other, that is the opposite of the promise of the field of mental health. Learning these concepts is a little bit like learning a new language. At the beginning, its important to stay rigid with your grammar and pronunciation. Over time, as you become more fluent, its less about the words you use and more about how you use them. Its not about labeling gaslighting correctly or incorrectly. Its about knowing how to handle it when somebody disagrees with you and knowing what to do if somebody is trying to gaslight you. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
The ChompSaw is a power tool made for kids to cut, craft, and create with cardboard. Its unique design makes it perfectly safe for little hands to use and easily carve precise corners or elegant edges through old boxes. Developed by college friends Kausi Raman and Max Liechty, ChompSaw raised $1.2 million in less than a month on Kickstarter and has already sold more than 30,000 units online. The ChompSaw is a winner of Fast Companys 2025 Innovation by Design Awards.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||