Create Your Personalized Skill Development Plan

As you’ve already noticed, there are A LOT of skills related to a career in People Analytics. And, I bet you already identified a lot of them in our first activity of this chapter as ones you wanted to develop further. Then there were probably some additional skills that you felt might be important to develop further because they are in-demand and could lead to more job opportunities. When you add all those up, there’s probably more items on your list to develop than you can reasonably focus on at one time. So, if you want to start developing your skills, which ones do you focus on first? My recommendation is to use the ikigai concept to help you prioritize that long list and create a skills-development plan. That’s because my hope for you is that you can be as fulfilled and happy in your people analytics career as possible while also being able to find work opportunities that enable you to support yourself and those you care for. Let’s get you that prioritized skill-development plan!

What you’ll need: Pull together the outputs of all your explore & engage activities from this chapter. This includes your list of skills you’re good at, interested in and want to develop, the list of in-demand skills from your job posting exploration exercise, and your career map that aligns to your career interests.

Your goal in this exercise is to create a prioritized list of skills you will focus on developing and the ways you will go about doing so. You will create a personalized skills list based on your responses to the self-discovery and explore & engage activities earlier in this chapter. As you build the list you’ll also prioritize the items, using a “star” system based on your personalized outcomes. The more stars (☆☆☆) something receives the higher priority it should be on your development plan.

Explore & Engage: Build Your Skill Development Plan

Fill in the table below with the skill names and stars following these steps. Note, everyone is different in how long of a list they would like to create. Some will want to create a short skill development plan of a few items they can focus on now and they may want to return to this activity in the future. Others, love to go through all the data and want to create a long list that can serve as a guide for a long way into the future. The below steps will walk you through a possible prioritization strategy, feel free to stop at any point where the list feels long enough based on how long you would like this plan to serve you for.

• Identify Priority 1 Skills: Skills that inspire you, grow you, and open opportunities. Return to the “Explore & Engage: In-Demand Skills” activity. Look for any skills that appeared on one of the job posting exploration tables in which you indicated it was an interest or passion and for which you indicated further development was needed to meet the job requirements. For each of those skills, search for them in the “Self-Discovery: What You Enjoy & What You’re Good At” activity to see if you also indicated that you wanted to develop further in this skill. These are likely to be your top priority skills to develop. They are items you are already drawn to, that you already had a personal desire to develop in, and that, if you were to develop further in them, might open more career options and opportunities for you because they are in demand and needed at higher levels. These are the skills in which further development will be enjoyable and in which there are existing jobs that exist just beyond your current capabilities, which means there is a career path in these skills areas that will challenge and grow you in engaging and rewarding ways. Priority 1 skills can include both those that you consider to be a strength today and those you do not currently have any strength in. But those two different types of skills, will translate differently in how you can apply them to your career, so we will label them differently in your skill-development priority list. We will sub-categorize your priority 1 skills into “specialization skills” and “expansion skills.” Further development of specialization skills will allow you to become a become a “master” or specialist in that topic. When you go deeper on things you are passionate about and already good at, you tap into the power of specialization. A specialist has power, they can do more and know more on a given topic than others and when you specialize on something you are passionate about, you’ll enjoy every minute of it!
  While development of a skill you are not currently strong in, will expand your skill set and breadth of expertise. Breadth and depth are both valuable and a well-balanced development plan will include both.
  • Add priority 1 skills to your list. Add every skill that appeared on one of the job posting tables from the “Explore & Engage: In-Demand Skills” activity in which you indicated it was an interest or passion and for which you indicated further development was needed to meet the job requirements to your list. Label any that you indicated as a current strength a “Priority 1 Specialization Skill” and any item for which you did not indicate it as a current strength a “Priority 1 Expansion Skill.“
• Identify Priority 2 Skills: Skills that keep you happy & skills that keep you paid. Priority 2 skills are those things which may not fully allow your passions to overlap with your paid career opportunities, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth developing. We humans love to learn, grow and be challenged, developing skills, even ones that may not necessarily be in-demand for a job that we can identify today can be instrumental in keeping you energized and enjoying your career (happiness enabling skills). And, it is possible, that these skills can become in-demand in the future and there you will be ready and available to offer your expertise. There are also going to be some skills that you aren’t super interested in building for their own sake, but that are critical to helping you land the kinds of roles and complete the kinds of projects that you are passionate about (career enabling skills). If this was a perfect world, I’d love for you to have a career where you only focus on developing skills you are passionate about, or at least interested in. But, even the best jobs have some activities or tasks that we aren’t going to be completely passionate about. And, they usually require some skills that we may not decide to develop and grow in on our own. But, if we want to have a career where we get to do the kind of work that does incite passion and where we can have ikigai moments as often as possible, we may need to have some additional skills that help us do that kind of work. Sometimes it’s worth giving the world what it needs even if it’s not a passion of yours, especially when you can get paid for doing it. [If you’ve seen job postings that have multiple aspects you really want as part of your career and they all have required skills that aren’t on your passion skill – well, guess what, it might be time to starting thinking of those as ‘passion enabling skills.’ Or, in ikigai terms vocation skills. These are our “Priority 2 Career Enabler Skills.” Even the most fun activities have some aspect to them that is less appealing. Think of building these skills like putting together a toy before you can play with it. Taking time to develop these skills will allow you to do the less exciting tasks quicker and more efficiently so you can have more time for the fun stuff, and it will ensure that you have access to the kinds of opportunities where you can do the work that you are truly passionate about.
  • Add Priority 2 Passion Enabler Skills to your list. Re-review the “Self-Discovery: What You Enjoy & What You’re Good At” activity for any skills that are not already on the list as a Priority 1 item that you marked as a “Passion” and indicated a desire to develop further. Don’t include those for which you only indicated a general interest. Since you haven’t found that these skills are in-demand for the kind of career opportunities that you find are best suited to you, you want to reserve your priority 2 spots only for those that you are most passionate about, because their purpose here is so that when you work on developing them, that effort will keep you truly energized, happy and passionate about your people analytics career.
  • Add Priority 2 Career Enabler Skills to your list. Re-review the job posting tables from the “Explore & Engage: In-Demand Skills” activity. All skills for which you indicated further development was needed and for which you had an interest or passion should already be on your list as a Priority 1 item. From the remaining in-demand skills, you will subjectively select the ones you believe would be good career enablers for you. To do so, consider each other following aspects:
    • How you feel about the job it was linked to. Is the skill aligned to a role that you would very much like to have either now or in the future? If yes, this skill is almost certainly a Priority 2 Career Enabler. Even though it might not be the specific thing you most love doing, it is the thing that helps enable opportunities for you to have a career in which you’ll spend more time doing things you do love doing.
    • How in-demand the skill is. Did the skill appear in multiple job roles? Are there are lot of other in-demand skills related to this one? For example, maybe you aren’t passionate about the specific skill of data visualization technology because you’d rather not spend your time working with the technology platforms. But you notice that it came up in multiple job postings, and that it also appeared alongside a lot of related skills for data visualization in the kinds of jobs you are interested in. Even if technology isn’t your thing, you might find that having this skill will enable you to take on the kinds of roles you are interested in and it can help bolster those other related skills, making you stronger all around.
    • How you feel about the skill. Is it a skill you could potentially become interested in? Or is it a skill you genuinely dislike and do not want to spend time learning? How you feel about a topic will affect how well you learn it. If you truly hate the idea of learning about something, you may not want to put it this high on the priority list. Don’t force yourself. 
• Identify Priority 3 Skills: Nice to Have Skills. This set of skills are those that would bring value to your career, but that you may not be able to prioritize and focus on right now. It’s still important to identify these skills in your development plan, because you never when a lucky opportunity may arise. For priority 3 skills, the goal will not be to go out and seek development opportunities directly, but you don’t want to miss an opportunity if it happens to present itself either. For example, maybe you’re only interested in a topic and it wasn’t a top priority for your skill-development plan, but you happen to be at a conference and need to choose which individual session to go to. If you notice one being held on that topic, it’s worth picking that over something that wasn’t on your priority list at all. You don’t want lower priority items interfering with your ability to focus on high priority items, but take the opportunities when they arise. And, as you achieve your skill development on higher priority items, your list will get shorter and you may want to promote your Priority 3 skills up a level, since they would in fact be “nice to have.” .
  • Add Priority 3 Interest Skills to your list. Re-review the “Self-Discovery: What You Enjoy & What You’re Good At” activity for any skills that are not already on the list as a Priority 1 or Priority 2 item that you marked as an “Interest” and for which you indicated a desire to develop further. Label these as a “Priority 3 Interest Skill.”
  • Add Priority 3 Job Skills to your list. Re-review the job posting tables from the “Explore & Engage: In-Demand Skills” activity. Label all skills for which you indicated further development was needed that are not already a Priority 1 or Priority 2 that you don’t absolutely hate as a “Priority 3 Job Skill.” (Note. use your judgement here, if there are skills others are asking for, that you really never want to develop, you don’t need to add them to your list, just know that these are the skills that could be potentially useful for your career.)