5 Interdisciplinary Skills for Future-Ready Workforces

What will the skills of the future be? It's a big question, but data provides some answers.

Employers will always look for talent that can work effectively across disciplines and teams. This is especially true for future-critical jobs that will demand skill sets different from those commonly used today.

That's why trends indicate interdisciplinary skills are key to becoming a successful worker across industries, both now and in the future. By developing a basic understanding of how people, technology, and businesses interact, interdisciplinary skills make it possible to navigate and solve complex problems that arise from these interactions.

It’s easy to see why interdisciplinary skills are so essential. They’re not just valuable in fields like medicine or engineering — they can also be applied across finance, law, education, and more.

Interdisciplinary Skills to Watch

Here's a look at five trending interdisciplinary skills that, based on data analysis, are likely be essential for future workforces.

Market research

Market research is a key part of any business and something every professional should know how to do. Researching the market helps you understand your customers, competitors, and the market as a whole. It can help you find new opportunities for growth in your business or industry.

A good market researcher should be able to:

• Collect data from multiple sources (surveys, interviews, focus groups) and analyze it using statistical tools like regression analysis or hierarchical clustering
• Identify trends within their chosen field
• Recommend changes based on research results

Adaptability

Candidates that are adept at changing and adapting to new situations will be essential for learning new future skills. Adaptability can help employees work well in a team as well as with people who have different personalities and goals. It’s also important when working under pressure — in order to get things done on time, everyone needs to be able to adjust their priorities or workflow when things come up unexpectedly.

Leadership and teamwork

Management skills are useful in any role that requires leading a team — even in technical roles such as software engineering — and facilitating collaboration between people with differing personalities, opinions, and ideas.

Successful leaders spend time understanding their staff members’ strengths and weaknesses — as well as their own strengths and weaknesses — to effectively communicate expectations or feedback. A good manager also learns how best to motivate their team to consistently deliver its best work.

Critical and analytical thinking

Critical and analytical thinking are two sides of the same coin, but they differ in their approaches. Critical thinking is about evaluating how you think — for instance, looking back at a situation to identify assumptions or biases. Analytical thinking refers to the ability to look at information, whether qualitative or quantitative, and recognize patterns.

These two skills aren't exclusively for scientific or technical fields; they’re important in any line of work. And as organizations rely more and more on technology and innovation, critical and analytical thinking are especially valuable in business.

Active learning

The skills you learn in school are only valuable if you can use them in the real world. Active learning involves students in the learning process rather than just having them read or listen to information passively. This type of active engagement can help students retain and apply knowledge more efficiently, which is why it’s an important part of any curriculum.

Active learning techniques improve learning success rates compared with passive methods, such as lectures or traditional group exercises, alone, according to the the Engageli's Active Learning Impact Study. Active learning also helps students better comprehend their subjects and solve problems on their own — two things they'll need when entering the workforce and upskilling/reskilling throughout their careers.

How to Gain Interdisciplinary Skills

Organizations that are looking to add these skills to their workforces have a couple ways to go about it: recruitment or development. For the latter, though, targeted training programs aren't the only solution.

Here are some simple ways employees and job candidates can develop interdisciplinary skills:

• Learn another language: Knowing more than one language can help you communicate with people from different cultures and backgrounds. Learning a second language also gives you insights into how languages work, which can be useful if you want to become a translator or codebreaker.
• Study the humanities: Studying history, literature, philosophy, and other subjects in the humanities can help you think critically about the world around you. This is particularly useful if you want to develop an understanding of social issues and how people interact with each other.
• Get involved in your community: Volunteering and getting involved in local activities is a great way to develop new skills and network with new people. It also helps you gain valuable experience you can include on your resume when applying for jobs.
• Listen to podcasts and audiobooks: Listening to podcasts and audiobooks is a great way to learn new things while doing something else, such as commuting or exercising. If you’re short on time, try listening while doing something else.
• Keep up with current affairs: Keeping up with the latest news and events in your area of interest will keep you updated on developments in your industry and enable you to apply this knowledge at work.

Tracking the Right Interdisciplinary Skills

There's no guarantee that future jobs will require these particular interdisciplinary skills, but analysis of recent labor market trends strongly indicates their upward trajectory. By continually tracking skills and their evolution, organizations can strategically plan for future workforces and make informed build-borrow-buy decisions today.