Jobhop Jobhop's blog : The 5 Skills You Need To Be An Agile Employee

Are you an agile employee?

Do you know what it means? An agile employee is someone who can quickly adapt to change, someone who thinks quickly, uses their initiative, is mission led and will swap their job role if the mission requires them to.

Many employees are not agile, they like to have a job role, they like to stay within that role and not take on anything more than they need to. As technology rapidly changes everything as we know it, employees with the ability to adapt to change quickly will be the ones in demand.

Employers need agile employees because they themselves are having to adapt to change quickly too, they can’t afford to be held back by employees who can’t handle change and try to fight against it.

The 5 skills you need to be an agile employee

Entrepreneurial skills

Don’t worry you wont be expected to have started up and sold businesses but if you think like an entrepreneur that definitely helps. The proper terminology for someone who’s employed but thinks and acts like an entrepreneur is an “intrapreneur” Richard Branson has always surrounded himself with intrapreneurs and many other employers are realising that intrapreneurs are the key to a successful business. As an intrapreneur you will be self motivated, proactive, mission led, results orientated and very comfortable with taking the initiative.

People skills

Collaboration is a big part of agile working and as an agile employee you will need to be able to communicate successfully with other team members to complete projects. You should be open and supportive, if you are closed and controlling then you will need to change dramatically or you’ll never become an agile employee.

Up-skill skills

As an agile employee you must have the ability to up-skill quickly. Technology is changing everything rapidly, the system you were using last week could be completely changed next week. You need to continuously up-skill to remain current and on the forefront of everything. Sometimes there wont even be time to take a course on the subject you’ll be expected to learn it on the go or copy what some bright spark on Youtube is doing!

Speed skills

Agile is fast, you need to have the ability to implement fast. An agile employee doesn’t have a meeting, make a suggestion then implement it 12 months down the line. As an agile employee you work at speed, you implement immediately, if it fails then it fails fast and you move onto the next plan with speed.

Communication skills

As an agile employee you need to be able to communicate well online as well as offline. You as well as every other employee has to understand the importance of being social, with one another as well as with your customers. As an agile employee you must also to be able to quickly and clearly communicate instructions to others, if there is something of value to be added to the project then your voice must be heard.

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Julie Bishop Jobhop.co.uk

Pic credit Alexis Monville

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