Important Professional Skills You Should Level Up in the New Year (+How to Do It!)

s the New Year is quickly approaching, you may find yourself wanting to reinvent yourself. These can be in the form of simple New Year's resolutions that, more often than not, are forgotten about within the first few weeks of the New Year. But if you want to find ways to improve your professional skills in the New Year, there are countless ways that you can commit and change the way you go about your work.

There are various ways to improve your professional skills, and though people work in a variety of different work environments, any of these skills can apply. Having an idea of what you wish to improve is just one of the first steps to assessing your professional skills and putting yourself to the ultimate test: developing your potential and knowledge.

Giving yourself an advantage such as learning more skills or assessing the ones you already have and building upon them, will only benefit you. Knowing what you need to do in order to level up in your position or even for growing personally, will only aid you in the future.

No matter if you’re an experienced professional or starting out your first job, working to improve yourself is a perfect way to keep up to date with workplace knowledge. As you prepare yourself for improvement, you open the door to gaining professional knowledge through experience. All you need to do is assess yourself personally and work towards making yourself appear more professional, overall improving your confidence with work-related tasks.

Here are some skills to keep in mind when you look to level up your professional skills in 2024:

• Communication
• Presentation Skills
• Teamwork
• Self-Awareness

Communication

Communication skills are important in any environment, workplace or not. But having good communication skills is vital for any job. It doesn’t matter if you work with a very minimal amount of employees or a bunch of people, this is a skill that will be used almost every day if not every moment of your work life.

If you’re not communicating with other employees or your customers, then more often than not, you're not effectively engaging in your work. This isn’t to say that every job requires you to communicate with another person in order to fulfill your work requirements, but it’s a skill that will come in handy in every field of work. You’ll be expected to communicate an idea or a problem to someone eventually, so knowing how to properly communicate is one of the most important skills to have.

Communicating gives you a voice, something that everyone should utilize no matter their job. Improving your communication can aid in giving you a voice amongst other employees. This will open the door for you to be more confident when you wish to express matters and ideas that are important to you, as it’ll only make you more comfortable at work and therefore improve your effectiveness.

The art of communication opens the door to conversations for just about anything ranging from new ideas in a creative setting, to unifying the employees together by getting a chance to have everyone's voice heard. How else are you expected to continue to work effectively and to the best of your ability if you’re not bouncing ideas off of each other, providing feedback for concerns or potential problems involving your workload, or even building better and stronger workplace relationships?

Presentation Skills

This particular skill goes hand-in-hand with communication. Whether you work in a professional setting where you’re expected to give a presentation on your own or even a group presentation, this skill is essential for keeping your communication skills up to par.

Having good presentation skills helps you to communicate openly and clearly to the people to whom you’re presenting, allows you an opportunity to work on how you present yourself professionally, and come to understand the audience to which you’re presenting. Presentation skills are of high importance no matter your field of work. As presentation skills and communication go hand-in-hand, getting these two skills down can make work life all the more simpler.

For one thing, you’ll communicate better than those who lack presentation skills. The art of speaking in front of a  group of people, no matter how many, can be incredibly daunting for some people. Whether it’s the feeling of being judged by your co-workers and boss or simply because you feel that you lack the proper speaking skills, there are many challenges that arise for those who fear presenting.

Although this may seem like the most obvious answer, the only way to conquer your fear of presenting or lack of presentation skills is to practice. By practicing before you present or pushing yourself to speak up during a presentation without holding yourself back, can build up your confidence and allow you to let go of all your worries.

This is a skill that is attainable if you push yourself out of your comfort zone even though it might be the last thing you want to do, but it will broaden your experiences and strengths. For one thing, it makes speaking in a job interview all the less stressful as you have experience with speaking professionally and communicating with an audience, which in and of itself is a highly important skill to have in any job interview.

Teamwork

When you collaborate with other employees, you are forming relationships and becoming more involved in your workplace environment. If you work as a team, whether it be on a project or simply asking for help or someone's opinion every now and then, you’re improving your workplace relationships, which will only make work more bearable. The importance of teamwork allows each person in the workplace an opportunity to contribute through communication and collaboration, both key pieces to an efficient and productive work environment.

Work shouldn’t be an environment where you find yourself dreading going to, especially if you’ve formed professional relationships with your fellow employees or employer. If you have a well-established relationship or are currently working to build a workplace relationship on the foundation of job satisfaction, your work as an employee will seem less stressful.

Once you’ve successfully worked with employees, you might find that you’re not as stressed, as you know that there are people you can openly communicate with if a problem or concern arises or you simply need someone else’s opinion. You’ll no longer have to worry about growing as an employee or getting full satisfaction out of your job if you have other co-workers by your side who can provide encouragement or be someone to vent to about any and everything work-related. Not only will you work more efficiently, but you might find that you’re more productive and confident.

Self-Awareness

Having self-awareness is something that should be built upon every day in your professional life. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate idea that you need to know everything about yourself in order to establish yourself proficiently in the workplace. Having self-awareness is essential to understand yourself and work colleagues. It simply means knowing how you want to present yourself at work regarding your strengths and weaknesses, thoughts and creativity, and emotions such as stress in relation to the specific work environment.

Having self-awareness allows you to assess:

• What you value in a healthy workplace environment
• What do you look for in your work
• Your career goals

Being self-aware often means knowing when you need to reach out for help or even when you feel incredibly confident about a task. This means understanding your strengths and weaknesses and reaching out when a situation arises where you need to work on your weaknesses.

This can come in handy, especially when you can use your self-awareness to better help co-workers. Once you’ve become self-aware of yourself, you can put yourself in other people’s shoes and understand their emotions and stressors, making for a more open and judgment-free work environment.

Now You Can Work to Apply These Skills This Coming Year!

Though you might have already had good skills in the workplace, it doesn’t hurt to want to build upon and improve the ones that you do have. Assessing yourself and your workplace goals is crucial for growing as a professional. Leveling up your skills in the New Year can encourage you to push yourself to continue to grow even as you have a stable job. Who knows, maybe the professional skills you apply to your work ethic in the New Year can bring about new and greater opportunities!