Coursera Job Skills of 2023

It’s that time of year where most people look back into the year and/or look forward into the new year. Retrospectives and introspection. I do a lot of planning when everybody is off on vacation, doing sometimes experimental things to see if I can come up with new tools/ideas to help me with my job in the new year.

So, in pops an email from Coursera about the projected popular job skills for 2023. I tried searching for a web site with the same materials, but it appears to be no accessible website. I received an email with a link guiding me to a page to download an eBook on job skills of 2023.

I’m just going to give the highlights of it: the most popular skills being taught on Coursera in 2022 were digital skills and human skills.

No surprise, huh? Of course! the skills would be centered around digital and human.

Coursera defined digital skills as the ability to use and create value using technology. Typical digital skills include social media, software development (actually, this was the bulk of popular skills in 2022), cybersecurity.

Human skills were defined as being able to relate with one another. Included were cognitive, social and emotional skills, creativity, critical thinking, information interpretation, decision-making, leadership (a perennial category), and communications (another perennial).

According to their research, the fastest growing skills are digital skills, mainly because these skills change more rapidly than human skills. Technology is the factor behind this change. Another new element is micro-credentials. Instead of degrees, companies are looking at micro-credentials as this might be a way of inexpensively upskilling a lot of people, especially those without the money.

So, to become employable, one might have to seek out micro-credentials that are suitable to certain jobs. In other words, it can’t be just any old micro-credentials – such as, I don’t know, doing PowerPoint presentations (I said I don’t know). If doing PowerPoint presentations led to huge financing or some positive business result, then the micro-credential becomes valuable; otherwise, it’s a dud.

One sorry statistic in their research is that only 5% of the executives in the study believe the companies are investing in their employees to upskill to keep up with the new working environment. Companies keep bellyaching that they can’t find skilled workers but they themselves don’t make the investment. And they wonder why they have a hard time retaining their employees?

The top ten digital skills were mostly in the arena of software development (scrum software, agile software, system software, etc), and then there was user experience and data visualization, SEO, CRM rounding out the top ten.

Human skills covered a broad spectrum: storytelling, change management, organizational development, influencing, people management, culture, collaboration, decision making, communication, planning.

Creativity or innovation is not in those lists. Nor emotional intelligence, agility, empathy. Of course, maybe that is because Coursera does not have courses around those topics.

Now is the time to start planning on what kind of skills you want to build, preferably one from the digital and one from the human.