Four Cs of a Career in Fashion

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Are you lot familiar with the Four Cs?

I first discovered them in Yaval Noah Harari's "21 Lessons for the 21st Century." They are: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and communication. Knowing how to employ those four ideas volition help fix yous to adapt and excel in your career, today and in our uncertain future.

Not that long ago, you could graduate with many types of degrees, having absorbed facts and their interrelation, and expect to build a nice career. Naturally, yous would continue learning subsequently graduation, but in that pre-digital era, when access to knowledge was constrained, learning was primarily arresting new facts.

In today'due south digital globe, career success means continuous evolution and learning, adapting your technical skills as well every bit the most basic aspects of learning and thinking.

Adopt learning skills for today's work environs

My belatedly father was co-founder of a small-town accounting house. Every bit a CPA, he and his partners would turn to an imposing set of heavy, beige revenue enhancement law books that filled the bookshelves his business firm had built for them. To me, every bit a child, they reached so wide and high they appeared to hold the whole business up.

I wasn't that far off. In that analog globe, the folks closest to the facts got the job done. And got the raises—and the promotions.

What's changed?

For 1, digitization—a democratization of knowledge. With sites like Google, Wikipedia and more specialized sites for niche information, the world of information is in all our pockets.

What else has changed is complication and mass disruption. Our world is many factors more circuitous than my father'south, or yours. Information technology's likewise clear that the pace of change will continue to accelerate.

How tin you not just survive, but thrive in all this disruption?

Master the "Four Cs" to excel in your career:

one.  Critical thinking

The commencement office of Accenture's Problem-Solution Mapping is almost stepping back and looking objectively at what we want to accomplish and why. It's as well most looking deeply into the problems identified to find root causes. Only once this is done practice nosotros construct hypotheses to exam in pursuit of solutions.

Charlie Munger is someone best known every bit the behind-the-scenes member, along with Warren Buffett, of the duad that built Berkshire Hathaway. In a speech, Munger once put information technology this way:

"Y'all've got to have models in your head. And yous've got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models."

Consider the words of my friend, a leader in a multibillion-dollar e-retailer. He told me, "I'm advising my daughter to learn Python as a way to put her data science degree to piece of work. In fact, we're going to acquire information technology together. But I'm besides stressing the importance of learning how to define the correct issues to solve and finding a framework for their solution."

She's got a smart father.

2.  Creativity

Once you've identified the best issues to solve, it often takes inventiveness to solve them. In their book "Pivot to the Futurity," Accenture colleagues Larry Downes, Omar Abbosh and Paul Nunes remind us that automation volition place greater intellectual demands on all of u.s.a. (emphasis below is mine):

"We are not amid those who think AI [artificial intelligence] will displace knowledge workers to a meaning extent. We practice, withal, believe they volition substantially alter the nature of work and in a positive manner.

"Today, also many jobs are boring and repetitive, leaving workers unmotivated or worse. AI technologies offer an opportunity to redesign piece of work away from the mundane and toward tasks that crave human reasoning, empathy, and creativity."

I concur with their belief that AI is non to be feared. We need to look at it as another tool for getting work done, and try non to listen to what some scholars telephone call "moral panic" over new technology. What it ways is we need to develop the qualities that machines will be less effective at "learning."

Human inventiveness is at the top of my list.

3.  Collaboration

In her TED Talk and acknowledged book, "Reality Is Broken: Why Games Brand U.s. Better and How They Tin can Modify the Globe," game developer Jane McGonigal makes a case for how multiplayer video games develop crucial learning skills.

Arguably, the highest on her listing is collaboration. She reminds usa how these games are rehearsals for the modern work earth, where delegating, co-creating and supporting each other are crucial keys to team success.

Collaboration is at the centre of every project at Accenture. What's more, our commitment to inclusion and diversity drives inventiveness and inspires a sense of belonging; equality is a powerful multiplier of innovation and growth.

4.  Communication

Of the four, this may exist the easiest to exercise—but the hardest to get correct! In their book on business advice, "Weekend Language," authors Andy Craig and Dave Yewma draw what happens to our storytelling abilities when the weekend is over and we're dorsum at the office:

"We're full of feature lists and ten-bespeak plans, 'high-level' terms and nonsense. Equally if that wasn't bad enough, nosotros beat out the snot out of our audiences with 118-slide PowerPoint presentations brimming-total of text. Audience members typically don't remember annihilation."

Their book trains readers to tell stories instead, and to tell them effectively to achieve business goals.

How important is storytelling to Accenture careers? Consider this: I piece of work out of the Digital Hub in Chicago's Accenture offices. Every month, our Storytelling Club meets to isolate and strengthen these communication "muscles" in front of a live audience. It'due south an invaluable resource.

Build the skills y'all need at Accenture

Now that y'all've learned what to acquire (and relearn), know that Accenture offers the tools to help you develop both your belittling and technical skills. Nosotros are committed to continuous learning and development and an surround where you can exist yourself and thrive.

Interact with the industry's best and brightest and innovate every day.

Observe your fit with Accenture.

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