Discover the Indispensable Skills Every Professional Needs
An interview with Diedre Downing, Chief Learning Officer at StoryIQ
Q: Could you start by telling us about StoryIQ? What does your company do, and who are your typical customers?
StoryIQ is a specialized corporate training company. Our courses support professionals in upskilling critical business skills, specifically in communication and data fluency. The courses are designed to be immediately useful and practical, imparting skills that busy professionals can use right away.
Our typical customers are teams within organizations that want to level up their data communication skills. Because virtually every professional role includes using, discussing, and making decisions with data, we support teams from all industries and departments.
We also offer public courses. Our customers who take advantage of these opportunities tend to be early—to mid-career professionals looking to learn skills to level up in their roles or take on new responsibilities.
Q: Many skills we learned in college seem outdated now. Which skills should professionals focus on as the career landscape continues to evolve?
I’ll put this out in the open now – I’ve been out of college for almost 20 years. I know that the experience has changed since the early 2000s, but for the most part, I think most of the practical skills that you are going to use in your career (unless you’re in a very technical or specialized field) are learned while working and out of the classroom.
Professionals need to apply their technical learning to actual situations, not just regurgitate a textbook answer. Skills such as sharing ideas, working well with others, networking, advocating for colleagues, and showing true leadership can always be honed.
This is especially true as technological advances are coming to us so quickly, threatening to upend our jobs and our futures. AI is an amazing tool, but it isn’t human.
Focusing on how you can use new technology to augment your role while doubling down on the advantages that you have as a human, is a fantastic way to future-proof your skillset.
Sure, AI can create a presentation deck for you – but you need to create talking points, consider the necessary context and background, understand how to reach the influential members of your audience, and convey the ideas with emotion and engagement – all capabilities that AI does not (currently) have.
Spend time engaging authentically with others to enhance your ability to understand how a room is reacting to what you are sharing. AI can’t tell you when to pivot, but your human intuition can.
Q: With busy work and personal lives, how can individuals effectively fit learning into their daily routines?
Learning doesn’t need to be arduous. You can create bite-sized learning experiences for yourself: reading short articles, listening to an audiobook during your commute or while you do chores, or creating a Slack channel with colleagues to share interesting ideas and resources.Â
Learning doesn’t mean you are becoming an expert in a topic.
Learning happens whenever you stretch your current understanding or perception of a topic. You’re also actively learning when you practice new skills – give yourself an achievable project to practice skills in a real-world context.
I’m guilty of eating lunch at my desk while I try to knock a few more things off my to-do list.
Instead, I could use the time to take short, asynchronous classes – LinkedIn Learning has lots of options to provide an overview of topics and skills that can help you determine if you want to dive deeper. The key is to make a habit of continuous learning, even if it’s just for 10 or 15 minutes a day.
Q: Data fluency and communication skills are not typically the first that come to mind when planning professional development. Are these skills critical for all professionals to develop, regardless of their field?
I can say without hesitation that being able to use and communicate with data are essential skills for professionals of any experience level.
Too often, teammates and managers assume that everyone knows how to use data in their roles. This is an unfair expectation. Unless you’re actively preparing for a role in data, it’s entirely possible that you’ve never received any formal (or perhaps even informal) instruction on using data to solve problems.
Using data effectively is not a skill that is taught in college. You’re really left on your own to figure out how to use data to answer questions and influence decisions.
The amount of data collected by organizations has grown exponentially, but training and support on how to use that data has not grown in the same way.
If you really want to become an indispensable member of an organization or open up new opportunities, being able to confidently discuss and use data is a must-have skill. Not everyone needs to be, or should be, a data scientist or data engineer.Â
An incredibly valuable role is that of the data translator – the person who can work with the data team and the business to solve problems, articulate requirements, and communicate insights in a way that provides value to stakeholders and leadership.Â
Communication is at the heart of all business. You can be an amazing Analyst/ Finance Director or Sales Manager, but if you can’t communicate your findings to the business in a way that wins the hearts and minds of your stakeholders, then you will always struggle to gain influence.
Q: What advice would you give to early-career and mid-career professionals as they navigate the current period of change and uncertainty in the workplace?
Find a mentor. Connecting with people in your field or organization with more experience than you can provide context to ongoing changes and suggest opportunities to push into projects that will grow your skills.
Join projects that let you flex into new skills or work with people outside of your team. Understanding an organization’s challenges through different lenses provides a more holistic view of how and where your skills are valuable to others. Â
Build your knowledge base via podcasts, LinkedIn, or regular short courses to grow your skills and stay updated on new developments. Join industry groups (LinkedIn groups, local professional meetups, or industry associations) to stay ahead of new developments and learn about other people’s perspectives on challenges or trends.
Identify two or three people in your industry who you aspire to or who are ahead of you in your career. Find out what they study for their professional growth and note what they are posting or writing about on LinkedIn.
To stay ahead, just doing your work is no longer enough; you need to actively learn about your work, too.
