3 skills every young person needs for success

Gen Z's future workforce is a landscape of constant change, with predictions of multiple job changes across industries. But amidst this uncertainty, there's a powerful skillset that can prepare them for anything: enterprise skills.

These skills aren't about mastering specific technicalities. They're about understanding how to work effectively, collaborate, and achieve goals. By focusing on these foundational abilities, we can empower young people to navigate their careers with confidence and adaptability. Here are just three of the most important enterprise skills young people can work on and refine to help them achieve success:

Communication

Communication is one of the most important skills any person should develop in their professional (and personal) lives. However, communication is less about being able to use dense vocabulary, or appear more intelligent than one’s counterparts; instead, communication is chiefly about being able to be understood and being able to understand others when working towards a mutual outcome. Great communicators strive to know and empathise with their audience, tailoring what they say to be fully comprehended by their audience. It’s crucial to be able to change one’s communication style from formal to informal, casual to professional, polite or firm, depending on their goals and their audience.

At the same time, strong communicators are also great listeners. It’s no surprise that many of the greatest politicians and influential leaders are said to make ordinary people feel as if they are the only people in the room when they’re in a conversation. These prominent personalities are powerful practitioners of active listening – the art of giving a person their full attention, and making them feel heard by listening without judgement, paraphrasing what the other person has said, and asking insightful questions to keep the conversation flowing. Young people can develop their communication skills through gaining work experience in service industries such as retail and hospitality, by trying their hand in leadership roles in organisations such as sports teams, or by trying out hobbies such as theatre, debate or public speaking competitions.

Collaboration

Very few people in the world can say that they don’t have to work co-operatively with others to get their work done – meaning that collaborative skills are essential to the modern worker. Like communication skills, collaboration requires that you understand yourself and your team members deeply, identifying attributes like working styles, strengths, weaknesses and underlying goals. Through these, you can start to build a picture of what success looks like for the team and its members, how you can split work efficiently to get the job done well, and how you can bring everyone’s best ideas and qualities to the forefront.

These days, collaboration can happen in-person, or online across a variety of platforms – emails, workplace messengers, collaborative, cloud-based documents and workflow management software, and a modern worker must be able to coordinate work across all of these to make sure everything gets done up to standard. Young people may have some advantage as they’re used to switching between platforms like social media, but a great way to develop these skills further could be with a project such as planning a birthday party or holiday with friends.

Resilience and adaptability

As we mentioned before, the age of the linear career is over – which means that adaptability and resilience will be key in demonstrating to managers, clients and employers alike that a young worker has the mindset needed to strive for success. In this context, resilience is the ability to make a comeback after a setback, while adaptability is the ability to respond positively to new and different circumstances.

Resilience and adaptability are essential for navigating the ever-changing job market. When faced with challenges or setbacks, resilient individuals are able to bounce back and learn from their experiences. Additionally, adaptable individuals can quickly adjust to new situations, embrace change, and seize opportunities. These qualities demonstrate a proactive and growth-oriented mindset, which is highly valued by employers.

When people hear about enterprise skills for the first time, it’s easy to believe that these qualities are set in stone, or can’t be changed – but this couldn’t be further from the truth. By implicitly and explicitly developing these skills through work and volunteering experiences, as well as learning methods and techniques surrounding these skills, young people have the opportunity to develop themselves into well-rounded professionals, ready to take on the many opportunities life will throw their way.