A good understanding of business concepts can benefit entrepreneurs and professionals at all levels of their career and business. Whichever industry you operate in, there are specific business skills that you need to possess to survive in a highly competitive environment.
Having a foundation in the top business skills gives you more confidence while dealing with your subordinates and clients. It opens doors to new opportunities that can help you expand your initiatives to reach larger audiences.
People who take extra business courses to learn important business skills can get more authority in their job scopes, get promoted faster than others, capture opportunities to transition to a new field, and get better job offers. In other words, learning business skills for workplace gives you a competitive edge over others. It makes you stand out among your colleagues and puts you in a better position to shine in your career.
These days, many fresh graduates realize the importance of enhancing their business skills for success in their careers. If you are also a professional or an aspiring entrepreneur, who’s looking for career and income growth opportunities, you should read this post until the end. Today, we will discuss the business skills that all professionals need to possess to expand and grow their potential for success.
What are Business Skills?
Before discussing their importance, let’s define what the term we are talking about means. Business skills refer to the talent, experience, exposure, and expertise
10 Most Important Business Skills
Here is a list of ten important business skills that can help your career growth.
1. An Understanding of Economics
A basic economics know-how serves as a valuable asset for professionals working in almost all industries. If you know more about market demand and pricing strategies, you actually have the toolkit for making effective critical decisions at your company.
According to a former CORe participant named Nicholas Grecco, who now works as a healthcare and education administrator, the concepts he learned in his Economics for Managers degree laid the foundation to help his company decide to invest in solar energy.
2. Data Analysis Skills
Studies show that a rising share of companies uses analytics these days to forecast their sales, compute their costs, and generate business growth. Big companies like Uber and Microsoft leverage in-depth data to improve their operations and services. According to LinkedIn, one of the most sought-after business skills in the job market is analytical reasoning. Professionals who possess data analysis skills can perform more efficiently and produce results faster than others. They can practice benchmarking against the other players in the industry to evaluate the performance of the company they work for.
If you know how to summarize large data sets, test hypotheses, and recognize data trends, you can pretty much get ahead of anyone in your area of expertise. These skills help you make more informed decisions than others, backed by facts and data, and benefit your company big time.
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3. Financial Accounting Skills
Having good know-how of the concepts and calculations of accounting is among the business skills that can benefit your career, even if you are not in the accounting field. Marketers, who generally do not play a numbers-focused role, also have to use numbers and calculations when dealing with the marketing budget and computing sales revenue.
Although finance feels intimidating to those who are not masters in this field, it is part and parcel of almost every aspect of a business. Knowing how financial management and accounting work can thus help you make progress in your career and align your goals with organizational goals.
When you know a little bit about financial accounting methods, you can determine your company's cash flow and profitability. This helps you realize the value of your job to the company's overall benefit.
4. Negotiation Skills
Whether you are at the start of your career or an experienced professional in a specific field, you need to be an excellent negotiator to prosper. Negotiation skills are among the most sought-after business skills by most employers in different sectors of the economy. If you are able to negotiate well, you can get your way with almost anybody, be it your colleagues, your subordinates, your co-workers, your clients, or your partners.
A report published by the World Economic Forum acknowledged negotiation skills as one of the top business skills required for professionals to prosper in the workplace. Improving your deal-making skills can help you in your path towards professional development. It gives you leverage at the bargaining table. Whether you are negotiating a higher salary with your boss or negotiating a better deal with a client, your negotiating ability will help you win conversations and get things done in your favor.
5. Business Management Skills
When we talk about business skills, it is almost impossible to ignore business management skills. Even if you are not running a business, you need to possess business management skills to deliver your work effectively.
Companies with strong managerial skills can intrinsically perform better than others. A study conducted by Gallup revealed that the managers of any organization account for 70% of the influence on employee engagement. This means companies need developing leaders and managers who can drive team morale and enhance productivity.
6. Leadership Skills
Having leadership skills is part of possessing overall business skills and is vital to your success at the workplace. Some might think that leadership and management are one and the same thing. But that’s not entirely true. Management is more focused on implementing policies and processes, while leadership is more about the people involved in ensuring the vision and goals are achieved.
Good leadership skills help you achieve organizational goals. As one of the top business skills, your leadership ability can help you guide change within an organization. Companies focused on social innovation also need good leadership skills in their employees.
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Leadership skills includes keeping calm in times of pressure, having a leading and charismatic personality, and holding power to motivate others. These makeup very important business skills that professionals must possess to succeed in their careers.
7. Communication Skills
If you want to achieve anything in your profession or business, you need to have good communication skills to interact with others effectively. Different business settings require different types of communication skills. These are the kinds of business skills you need for coordinating your efforts and accomplishing organizational goals. If you communicate ineffectively or lack communication skills altogether, you will be catastrophic to the organization.
Therefore, along with developing other important business skills, you need to constantly improve your communication styles. This also includes developing the ability to understand other people's communication tone and style. This means you should be good at listening, reading body language, and showing empathy to others.
8. Emotional Intelligence
Another important aspect of business skills is emotional intelligence. Research shows that emotional intelligence is among the leading indicators of good performance at a workplace. A recent study conducted by TalentSmart showed that 90% of top performers possess a high level of emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence can be broken down into four different components: self-management, self-awareness, relationship management, and social awareness. That means when you have emotional intelligence, you can first understand your own emotions and then relate to other people’s emotions. This is a must-have skill for marketers because they need to relate to the emotional triggers of their customers to drive more sales.
9. Decision-Making Skills
These are some of those business skills that you simply cannot survive without in the corporate world. At every step of your profession or business, you will have to navigate your way through complex challenges, which will require effective decision-making skills. Selecting employees to form teams, determining the correct allocation of resources, building a business marketing strategy, and implementing new initiatives across the organization all require decision-making skills.
Most companies now have access to various tools and resources that enable them to gather data, which gives them valuable insights and makes it easier for them to make data-driven decisions. Nonetheless, these tools will not be useful to someone who lacks decision-making skills.
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10. Website Building Skills
Gone are the days when businesses and individuals had to entirely rely on programmers and web developers to create a simple website that would represent their brand. You can now create a website on your own without having to write any code with the help of user-friendly website builders and tools available in the market. In fact, these are among the most specific business skills you can possess.
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An example of such a website builder is Strikingly, a growing platform for small and large organizations to make professional websites for showcasing products and services. A business cannot survive these days without a solid online presence, and there is no better way to establish your existence on the internet than to have a website dedicated to your purpose.
If you want to build an appealing and professional-looking website for your company, hop on to Strikingly and sign up for your free account today.
