by Janus Boye
What are the key skills that Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, or Google seek?
My conversation with New York-based Neal Stimler quickly turned to our shared appetite for learning and trying to understand what's next. The top skills in high demand by the tech giants do shape much of the strategic initiatives and innovation happening. Understanding the essential skills also helps an interdisciplinary talent like Neal work with organizations to bridge the gap to the next level.
I've worked with Neal for over a decade and first met him when he was with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in various content, digital, and partnership roles.
Today Neal is also the founder, owner, and president of the executive management consulting firm, Stimler Advantage, and Neal is our expert of the month.
What are the critical skills in 2021, and what does it mean to you?
You might think that the fog is clearing when it comes to leadership at the intersection of collaboration, digital, and innovation, but that's not really what Neal is seeing. In his view, there's quite a bit of distraction and noise, also coming out of the pandemic.
Asked to look out across his diverse customers, Neal sees a considerable demand for delivering projects at speed and scale. It's all about making businesses more efficient and empowering employees to be more innovative.
When Neal looks at the skills in high demand today, he, in particular, identified these competencies:
Artificial intelligence and machine learning
Building cloud applications
Cybersecurity
Moving to low-code/no-code environments
These are more than just tech trends in Neal's view. The trick is not only to identify them, but the hard part can be to embrace them. That takes time, change and pain, but also comes with significant promise.
How do you get these vital skills?
As a lifelong learner, Neal found himself taking online courses on Coursera and LinkedIn Learning. He's interested in the applied, and practical learning attained with digital badges, like those offered by Credly, and certifications as a way to support continued learning and demonstrate skills. certifications as a way to support continued learning and demonstrate skills.
From Neal’s LinkedIn profile, where he shared a recent Coursera certification on ‘Key Technology Foundations Specialization’ from IBM
In Neal's view, LinkedIn is particularly good for soft skills and offers a space for leadership and strategy insights. On the other hand, Coursera is excellent for the more technical skills and built for a practical experience of a technology-driven world.
With a digital-first and work from anywhere office, why is enterprise content management important?
Neal believes that an enterprise content management approach to digitized and born-digital content is essential for any organization. Enterprise content management (ECM) "is the systematic collection and organization of information that is to be used by a designated audience – business executives and customers." Leveraging machine learning helps organizations better find, organize, understand, and deploy diverse asset types and classes to deliver value for their customers across the digital landscape.
Neal is also a big fan of experimentation. He was an early adopter of Google Glass and is now looking into the next generation of Snap Inc.'s Spectacles. These are their dual display glasses built for creators to explore new ways to fuse fun and utility through immersive augmented reality. To Neal, it is not just about reading up on the latest trends, watching online talks, or browsing the web for relevant content. It's also about actually trying things out and working to turn experience into an advantage.
Why are interconnected digital content experiences critical business and customer experience imperative today?
Neal spoke with me about the context of the metaverse. Author and futurist Cathy Hackl, a leading proponent of the metaverse, states that one definition of the term "describes the concept of a future iteration of the internet, made up of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe."
3D models and environments, augmented, mixed and virtual reality, and video games, along with the vastness of the content on the Internet, will be the always-on hyper-connected reality of the technology-infused world.
As related to ECM, Neal encourages organizations to invest in digital asset, product, and service innovation for the metaverse.
Learn more about Neal
You can subscribe to the Stimler Advantage newsletter, or follow the company on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Back in December 2018, Neal shared his thinking on partnership in one of our most popular posts that year: Stewards over gatekeepers: Three principles for partnerships.
Back in 2014, at the Museums and the Web Conference in Florence, Italy, Neal shared his thoughts about the future of wearable technologies for art, culture, science, and digital content experiences. His observations about the future of wearable technologies are prescient as these technologies have continued to evolve. You can find the video below.