From chatbots to massive industrial fabrication machines, automation is everywhere in the workplace, and it’s here to stay.

Understandably, people are apprehensive about the rise of automation. We’ve all heard the horror stories about automation replacing humans in the workplace. Still, the cold reality is that we’re a long way off from automation and artificial intelligence completely replacing human workers.

The key to surviving this disruptive wave of technology is to have skills that can never be replaced by automation. Here is a shortlist of career skills that you should focus on to insulate yourself from the impacts of automation in your industry.

1) Ability to Tell a Story

Communication abilities are crucial for getting attention and persuading others. The most valuable kind of communication is storytelling.

Rather than just telling facts, storytellers paint a picture with both hard facts and ‘soft’ details. Storytelling is effective communication because it uses facts and rhetoric to get the attention of others, possibly inspiring them to take action. While there have been attempts to automate basic storytelling, the capacity to communicate compellingly is difficult to automate, and therefore hard to replace.

2) Ability to Contextualize

Learning the background and motivations of a company or a person makes your ability to communicate much more effectively. This kind of contextual comprehension shows you have an understanding of the dynamics of situations, which even the most sophisticated robots cannot pull off.

Moreover, if you can quickly recognize patterns and grasp the dynamics of a situation or area of expertise, you have something merely a Google search can’t replicate.

If you can develop expertise and use it, you are more likely to gain access to new knowledge as an insider. People that have a mix of expertise and fluency in gaining new knowledge will stay ahead of any robot.

3) Emotional IQ

AI programs are still quite basic in their capacity to comprehend the emotional tone of a speaker and conversation.

The most fundamental degree of emotional understanding is the capacity to identify relevant emotions that play in a given situation. The next level is the capability to effectively intervene in an emotionally charged situation. Those with the highest degree of emotional competence are able to persuade people by making an emotional appeal.

While a computer may be able to muddle its way through the first level of emotional IQ, technology still isn’t capable of the second two.

4) Teaching Ability

Automation has contributed significantly to education in terms of quality and increased access. However, effective teaching still calls for many innately human abilities that are difficult to automate, such as the ability to comprehend a person’s ability to grasp the material.

Employees are an essential asset in any organization, and teaching employees is essential to increasing the value of this asset. From a management perspective, the capacity to identify organizational skills gaps fill those gaps is something automation cannot do effectively.

5) Networking

Although social websites make it simpler to develop and maintain personal networks, networking is very much human activity. If you are not a natural networker, try to connect with someone who is, as people are commonly willing to share their network connections.

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