Learn Top Skills to Future-Proof Your Career (2024)

Top skills and courses

There's a new buzzword that's changing the way employers reward, promote, and hire. It's skills. Instead of 'who do you know?' or 'where did you go to school?', the question is, 'what can you do'?

Skills, and keeping them sharp, are key to helping you stand out, stay competitive, and ultimately, future-proof your career.

We compared the top skills professionals had in 2015 to those they have for the same job today to see just how much things have changed. Use this data to identify and close any skill gaps in your skill set.

First, we'll share the top skills LinkedIn members added to their profiles across all professionals, broken out into two sets of skills: soft skills, and hard skills. These are the skills that can help you land your next opportunity. These 20 skills were listed in 78% of jobs posted on LinkedIn in the last three months globally*.

Next, we surface the top skills members added to their profiles in specific areas of expertise, so you can focus on learning the right skills to future-proof your career in your unique job function.

Watch LinkedIn Learning courses to learn any of these skills for free until September 30, 2022.

*Methodology: Analysis of skills mentioned in paid job postings listed on LinkedIn between May 1 - July 31, 2022

Hard skills can help you get a recruiter's attention, but soft skills can help you land the job. Soft skills are in demand across industries. In fact, 45% of all LinkedIn Premium jobs posted within the past 3 months mention the importance of communication skills. From your colleagues' perspective, more than 3 in 5 (61%) of professionals say soft skills in the workplace are just as important as hard skills.

Since the pandemic, these 'people skills', have become more powerful than ever. Linda Jingfang Cai, VP of talent development at Linkedin, calls soft skills, "the currency of the future workplace".

We looked at the top trending skills added to LinkedIn profiles across all professionals. These are the soft skills that showed up the most. Learn the top trending soft skills today to ensure you have the skillset for what's next. Dive into the list and courses to learn them for free until September 30, 2022.

Top Soft Skills to Future-Proof Your Career:

1. Leadership - Leadership Tips, Tactics, and Advice with Elizabeth Lotardo & Lisa Earle McLeod

2. Communication - Communication within High-Performing Teams with Daisy Lovelace

3. Problem Solving - The Secret to Better Decisions: Stop Hoarding Chips with Seth Godin

4. Management - Be the Manager People Won't Leave with Laurie Ruettimann

5. Time Management - Time Management Fundamentals with Dave Crenshaw

6. Strategy - How to Make Strategic Thinking a Habit with Dorie Clark

Hard skills are your job-specific skills. Employers often look to these skills to decide whether to call you in for an interview. They're the ones most affected by the ever-present whirlwind changes in technology.

Fast Company reports that the share of highly skilled jobs has increased by 25% in the last 20 years and more than a billion jobs worldwide will be transformed in the next decade. Change is inevitable and new hard skills will continue to emerge as the workforce evolves.

These top hard skills are the ones that showed up the most on LinkedIn profiles. Check out the top trending hard skills today and dive into the list and courses to learn them for free until September 30, 2022. Dig into top skills lists for your unique job function in the next section.

1. Customer Service - Serving Customers in a Continuously Changing World with David Brownlee
2. Sales - Asking Great Sales Questions with Jeff Bloomfield
3. Accounting - Lean Accounting Foundations with Joshua Rischin
4. Business Development - Business Development: Strategic Planning with Meridith Powell
5. Marketing - Marketing Foundations: The Marketing Funnel with Brad Batesole
6. Digital Marketing-Digital Marketing Foundations with Brad Batesole
7. Sales Management - Sales Management Foundations with Drew Boyd
8. Finance -Financial Basics Everyone Should Know with Michael McDonald
9. Social Media - Social Media Marketing Foundations with Brian Honigman
10. Sales & Marketing - Create a Go-to-Market Plan with Deirdre Breakenridge
11. Financial Analysis - Corporate Financial Statement Analysis with Earl Kay Stice
12. Engineering - Python for Engineers and Scientists with Michele Vallisneri
13. Social Media Marketing - Social Media Marketing: Strategy and Optimization with Martin Waxman
14. SQL - SQL for Non-Programmers with Julianne Thouin

These are the skills that make you an expert in what you do. They separate you from colleagues in other departments or roles and they are transferable to any company in your field.

The top skills for your unique job function can help you identify and close skill gaps, grow your career, or plot your path toward a role change. These skills can help you future-proof your career as a marketer, financial analyst or accountant, project manager, business professional, IT professional, engineer, or sales professional.

Use the tabs below to navigate to the area of expertise that best describes your role.

Watch any of the courses to learn the skills for free until September 30, 2022.

The skill sets for jobs shift, and new ones emerge, but learning trending skills can ensure your access to opportunities and help you future-proof your career. So, no matter what comes next, you know you're ready.

Use the lists of the top skills in this post to identify skill gaps as a professional or in your unique area of expertise. Start to close those skill gaps by watching LinkedIn Learning courses for free until September 30, 2022.

Methodology

This analysis represents the world seen through the lens of LinkedIn data, drawn from the anonymized and aggregated profile information of LinkedIn's members around the world. We looked at LinkedIn profiles across all professionals, as well as across marketing, project management, IT, engineering, finance and accounting, and sales functions.

We look at jobs that fall within each function and identify the most important skills in each year based on LinkedIn’s Skills Genome. The similarity score between two years reflects both the overlap of common skills between each year as well as the relative importance of those skills for each year. How similar a skill is to another skill is calculated based on how frequently the skills appear together on a LinkedIn’s member profile and other member data.

All data represents aggregated information from the last 6 years. For the year 2021, data used only represents skills added up to November 2021, and does not represent the complete year.