Five Underrated Professional Skills More People Should Care About

I’ve been asked before if I would be willing to share any advice or tips with young people on how to be successful at work at a few different points in my career. As I think back on what I likely said in those early days or flip through the slides I’ve presented to classrooms in more recent years, the one consistency is that my advice hasn’t been consistent. At least, not entirely. 

The skills I have emphasized or the mindsets I have promoted most have been slightly different each time. I guess that’s because I, too, have changed over time. I keep learning and growing as my career progresses and I experience new things. Given that, what I’m about to highlight are those which are most present in my mind at this point in time.

The other thing I noticed is that the skills I heard other speakers highlighting were so ones which, while helpful, are the same skills everyone else was talking about. “Being resilient” or “being curious” are great and things which I do believe are valuable, but when that’s the only advice anyone ever says, it all kind of becomes white noise.

In light of that, I’ve decided not to write about the “best” or most lauded skills. Rather, I want to focus on skills that I’ve found incredibly useful and valued but those which don’t have articles or talks dedicated to them. 

A quick aside: my original post had ten underrated skills. After writing about the first two of these skills, I realized I had a lot to say about each one of these. For the sake of attention spans and my own need to give my brain a break on this topic, I have culled this post to the top five for now. I plan on sharing a second post with the other five in a part two. Stay tuned.

For those who want the quick version, here’s the TL;DR:

1. Taking notes. Yes, AI meeting summaries can cover the basics of who said what. However, notes shouldn’t just be a list of basic information like tasks and due dates (though even that is helpful since virtually none of us have eidedic memories). A better title for this skill might be taking valuable notes. Good notes should be things like reminders to follow-up with people who weren’t able to make it to the meeting and could have provided valuable input or a note to chat with that person who looked doubtful of a decision that was made during the call and needs to be followed up with in a different setting. They should be ideas for new opportunities or potential new ways of working that the conversation sparked in you that you want to take back to your manager or your team to discuss before pitching to the full group. And so on…

2. Taking ownership. Being accountable is a base requirement for success in any job. Taking ownership, though, will not only allow you to level up your skills but others’ perception of you as well. It will open up doors to new opportunities and start you on the path to becoming a leader (assuming you want to be one). How do you do it? You have to take an active role in the work going on around you and the conversations you get invited to. Where possible, voice ideas or ask useful questions, whether it’s about something you directly contribute to or not. Demonstrate a desire to understand how your work can influence and support others’ work. Volunteer to take on new tasks where it makes sense, which will allow you to strategically grow your skill set and the size of your influence and impact on the work.  

3. Knowing the “so what” of what you’re doing. Take the time to understand how your work fits into your team’s, your org’s and your overall company’s bigger picture. How does the work you’re doing help further the mission or move the needle on a KPI? How will it help drive valuable business decisions or answer questions to key hypotheses? Understanding the answers to these questions will allow you to think beyond just what was asked of you and provide even more value in the work you deliver. Beyond that, it will allow you to speak to your work in a more meaningful way to key stakeholders, positioning you as a thought partner rather than just a doer. And to leadership, it will show that you “get it,” making your name one of the first to come to mind for big initiatives, presentations, promotions and more.   

4. Having a “figure it out” mindset. People with this mindset are willing to try and learn new things in a mostly or semi-independent way. They don’t let fear of the unknown keep them from trying something new. Being someone with this mindset doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever ask questions. You can and should ask smart questions that will allow you to move forward and get the work done on your own. Doing so will allow you to grow your existing skills and develop new ones. 

5. Measuring your impact. Some roles in the workplace are naturally set up for impact measurement but many are not. For strategists especially and analysts to some extent, it can be challenging to measure the exact change or improvement caused by your work. How does one measure the exact change your brand voice strategy had on the overall brand’s performance or a given product within the brand? How do we know it was your strategy alone and not some other element changed by the media team or product team? Also, a lot of times strategies aren’t implemented rapidly. They are upstream of things; they set the overall framework which other teams need to ingest, understand and then apply to their own work, all of which can take months or even years. However, despite these challenges, that doesn’t mean you can’t find ways. Wherever possible, especially for smaller or more narrow projects, build testing and measurement into your project plan. When that’s not possible, sometimes you have to go back and measure things on your own to get a best estimate. For cases where hard numbers just aren’t there, gather “softer” measurements. Anything is better than nothing.

If you read through the above and find yourself wanting more (e.g. examples, ramblings, etc.), read on... 

Skill #1: Taking notes.

Exciting, right? Just the skill you wanted to read on how to become successful in the professional world, I’m sure. But remember, these are underrated skills; not the flashy ones. 

I can still hear the doubt out there, though. I’m sure most people who read that line frowned or maybe audibly scoffed. I get it. Note taking kind of sucks. It’s not fun or exciting. It’s not glamorous or what people highlight on their resumes or LinkedIn profiles. Some people would even say it’s redundant in the world of AI, with meeting recaps and other tools providing automated documentation. But hear me out for a sec.   

Taking notes in a meeting does so many things for you. One, it forces your brain to engage with the conversation. You have to be actively listening in order to be able to write about the conversation. Some people out there are probably shouting at their computer, “But I can actively listen without writing things down.” To them I say, that’s true. But can you remember everything? Do you have an eidetic memory? Considering its incredibly low prevalence, let’s assume no. 

Others out there are saying, if I can listen actively without taking notes and automated tools are taking down documentation, why should I bother? To them I say, what kind of notes will AI take? 

Will AI notice the way someone tried to speak up about a certain topic but was bowled over by a dominating voice and their thoughts were never shared? Will it note that you should follow up with that person afterwards to see if they had anything valuable to add? Will it notice when your boss puts on their “this client/stakeholders is wrong but we have to keep them happy” face and that, while they are saying one thing in the meeting, you should probably follow-up with them afterwards on that one point to discuss how best to move forward? 

Maybe someday it will be able to know and do all of those things, but for now, it’s up to you. 

Which leads to the real point which is, take meaningful notes. If all you’re doing is copying down what an AI tool can summarize, you’re not writing down the important stuff. Sure, a summary of a conversation is helpful. Notating decisions, action items, deadlines decided-upon, responsibilities and the works – all that is necessary and will drive those things home for you so you don’t forget twenty minutes after the call has ended. The really useful notes go beyond that, though, and will lead you to have more interesting conversations and do more meaningful work. 

Skill #2: Taking ownership.

Originally, I had written this skill as “being accountable,” but ownership goes beyond accountability not only in its scope but in its potential impact on your career. 

Accountability is actually a key aspect of ownership. When you’re accountable, managers and coworkers know you will be responsible for your share of the work, to be present in meetings and to be a reliable partner. 

I once had a direct report slack me twenty minutes before our weekly project sync to ask, “Was I supposed to have anything done for this meeting?” to which I responded, “What do the meeting notes from last week’s sync say for next steps?” After a series of ellipses starting and stopping again, followed by a vague question-phrased statement, I then had to spell out exactly what they should have been working on for the past week minutes before we met with other team members and my boss to share updates. I’ve had other direct reports who were given multi-sprint assignments tell me in their ongoing weekly one-on-ones that they were making good progress only to reach the deadline and find out they had done nothing. When questioned what happened, they said, “I wasn’t sure what to do.” 

There’s no faster way to lose credibility and others’ trust in you than to take no accountability for the work you’ve been given. Someone who takes accountability in their work keeps track of their own tasks. If they don’t understand how to do something or what exactly is being asked for, they proactively ask the questions rather than wait until the due date hits to reveal their uncertainty. 

Ownership, again, is like accountability but goes further. People who take ownership not only responsibly manage their work but also influence or support the work around them as well. Let me give you an example of what I mean by that.

If you are working on a task for a project and come across an issue, someone who takes ownership won’t just wait until the next project sync – which could be days or weeks later – to share that update. They will reach out to their manager or the project lead when it happens and discuss how they might take immediate steps to resolve the issue so they can continue with their work as opposed to waiting for the next meeting to figure it out then. 

People who take ownership will actively look for new opportunities or spot ways they can contribute, even if it goes beyond the task they’ve been assigned. They voice ideas or volunteer to take on new things, where appropriate. People who take ownership of work also ask questions and aren’t afraid to discuss the overall picture, even if those questions touch on work that isn’t their direct responsibility. Ultimately, they try to better understand how all of the work fits together and how they as an individual can better support the whole, as opposed to simply focusing on checking the box that has been placed before them and ignoring the rest. 

Demonstrating accountability is a basic, critical skill for all junior level professionals. Demonstrating ownership signals to your manager and other leaders that you are ready to take on more responsibility and rise in level. 

*It should be noted here that when taking on more ownership, you can risk scope creep. If you continually take on more responsibility or contribute more skills to the team, your pay and/or position should reflect this. Ensuring you don’t get taken advantage of is a topic for a whole other post, but just know that, while this skill is valuable, it needs to be utilized with care.

Skill #3: Knowing the “so what” of what you’re doing.

Being able to complete a project and provide a great deliverable is great, especially when you’re first starting out your career. At that point, getting something done well and on time is a major win. However, people who truly excel and impress in the workplace don’t just execute the tasks they are given. They’re able to think through how that project fits into the bigger picture and use that knowledge to 1) improve the quality of the work they do and 2) improve how others understand their work. 

On the first point, thinking critically about the project you’re given will allow you to approach it more thoughtfully. In most cases, not every single task or aspect of a project is going to be spelled out for you in a neat little checklist. Your boss, client or stakeholder will expect you to hear the request being made, ask smart questions and bring your own subject matter expertise to the table to fill in the gaps. This is particularly true for people working in strategy or analytics roles.

For instance, a common project or task given to junior analysts is to build a dashboard for a stakeholder. While your team might have a project brief that you need to fill out when receiving the request, briefs are just a framework. They typically only cover the basics – things like, who’s going to use the dashboard (e.g. executive leadership team, a functional strategy team, external vendor partners, etc.), what data / measures they care most about (e.g. KPI performance, social media engagement data, finance data, etc.) and how often they plan to access the dashboard. 

These are useful starting points to have in order before beginning your concept development or prototype design. However, focusing only on what is explicitly asked for won’t tell you every single filter your users might need to slice and dice the data by. They won’t tell you in what order to place your charts and visuals, nor what exact kinds of charts and visualizations to use. If you build a dashboard only using these inputs, you will likely deliver something that is just ok as opposed to outstanding. 

Strategic thinkers will take in the initial project needs while also trying to put themselves into the end users’ shoes. They will try to think how the end users think. In the dashboard example, they will try to think through how data savvy their end users are, how straightforward or complex the user’s analysis or reporting needs are, what questions the user might ask of the data or what decisions they will want to use the data to help make, and so on. 

Thinking through these things will help you spot new ways of thinking about the deliverable and identify additional things that will add value to it. It also will allow you to design and deliver something that will truly add value and support to your end user’s day. 

In order to do this, you need to develop the skills to think beyond the ask and understand the bigger picture. How does one do that? 

When you’re just starting out in your career or a new job, take the time to understand how your work fits into your team’s, your org’s and your overall company’s bigger picture. Know how the work you’re doing helps further the mission or move the needle on a KPI, how it will help drive valuable business decisions or answer questions to key hypotheses. If you get stuck trying to think through these things on your own, ask your user/stakeholder if you can interview them. Ask them questions about how they use your data or ask if they are willing to screenshare while they use the existing tools and talk through their process and feedback along the way. The more you practice these skills the easier they will get over time, and the more your work will naturally level up. 

Beyond just executing better work, understanding the big picture will allow you to frame your work – aka speak to it – significantly better than if you don’t. This matters because the people who go farthest and are rewarded most in their careers aren’t just the people who have great skills. They’re people who are great communicators as well.

I can’t count the number of times I have sat through a presentation of a deliverable by a junior person and heard, “This chart shows you the number of visitors over time and the average time spent by channel,” or “40% of your target audience feel X about your brand.” A lot of people’s, particularly young ones’, tendency is to read off whatever it is you are presenting. 

The trouble with this is that your audience doesn’t want that. They know how to read a slide or a chart. What your audience really wants to understand – and what takes more mental energy for them to figure out when first faced with whatever it is you are presenting – is why those things matter or what it means for them. 

What does that chart tell us about how much value we should place on each of those channels (i.e. how the company allocates its money and resources)? Is the existing channel strategy aligned with the biggest and most valuable audience as shown in your data visualizations? Or how does that attitude about our brand matter in the context of our brand positioning? How does this compare with our competition and how our target audience perceives them? Do we need to evolve our creative approach or adjust our brand voice to change that perception (i.e. rethink our current campaigns)?  

These are the “so what” questions you should think through and be able to speak to when sharing any work you complete, whether that is in a live presentation or via an email. If you don’t address these things, your stakeholders will either dismiss the work and not realize its value, or they will have to take the time to think through the implications of what you have shared to get the answers on their own, placing the mental load on them. Considering how busy people are, the former is more likely to happen than the latter.

At the end of the day, how you speak to your work affects how much of an impact it will have as well as how others will perceive your contributions to the company. If all you are ever able to say is, here is the thing you asked for, people may appreciate that the thing they asked for got done. However, if you are able to show how it supported the mission by improving X by Y or drove better decision making that resulted in Z, then you will go leaps ahead in your career. 

Reading through all of that, you may find yourself wondering, what if I don’t want to do all of that or don’t have the skills yet? 

For the first group, if all you do is take down exactly what is said and execute that, you won’t get in trouble nor will you necessarily earn a bad reputation. However, if you only ever follow exact directions, you will become known as someone who is a doer, not a thinker. You won’t be tapped for more interesting and strategic work, to liaise with stakeholders or clients, nor to run projects or take on more responsibility. While doers can be useful for teams with a huge log of ad-hoc and urgent, quick-turn requests, their contributions will be hamstringed by their narrow lens. Doers and the kinds of tasks they get assigned are exactly the kinds of roles most threatened by A.I. If you want to try to reduce your chances of redundancy, being a strategic thinker is a must. 

For those who want to think this way, pay attention to how your boss or other leaders talk about their work. See how they frame up the team’s contributions and tie it back to the bigger picture. Also, don’t be afraid to ask. See if your boss or a smart colleague will let you practice presenting to them first, whether you pitch it to them as a formal dry run or a simple walk through. Most people will be happy to say yes assuming they have the time. Hopefully your team is set up so that you aren’t cold presenting all of the time and are proactively coaching you to build this skill. However, if they aren’t, even running through a presentation out loud to yourself can help you hear the gaps far better than not practicing at all.

Skill #4: Having a “figure it out” mindset.

There are few things more annoying to your coworkers than having to deal with someone who puts zero effort into trying to solve a problem or answer a question on their own. Whether it’s caused by fear of doing something wrong or plain laziness, this behavior and its subsequent irritations have become so popular that they have even sparked satirical websites dedicated to them. 

Analysts, unfortunately, work in positions where they will be on the receiving end of this type of behavior a lot throughout their careers, especially in junior and mid-level roles. How you deal with these types of questions probably merits an article all on its own. That’s not the point of this post, though. The point is that you should do everything you can to never be the person who is on the receiving end of one of those links. 

Having a “figure it out” mindset should prevent that. Not only will this mindset gain a lot of goodwill amongst your colleagues, but it will allow you to broaden and grow your skills at a faster rate. But what exactly does it mean?

A “figure it out” mindset is one where a person accepts they don’t fully understand something or aren’t familiar with it and try to figure out how to do it on their own. They’re unafraid of the unknown or at least don’t let their fear keep them from trying something new. 

Despite my earlier statement, they are not people who never ask questions. In fact, these people often ask more questions than your average person. However, they ask smart questions – questions which allow them to move forward or figure out what to do next without being told step-by-step exactly what to do and without putting the weight of their work on another person. 

All of this might sound like you shouldn’t ever ask for help. That’s not the intended message. It is natural to have questions, especially at the start of your career. None of us are born experts. However, there’s a difference between asking smart questions that enable you to learn and asking questions that dump the mental load (i.e. work) onto someone else. 

For instance, an analyst who asks me, “What’s the source of truth for QAing data for this source? I haven’t worked with it before, and I want to make sure my data is coming out right,” is a far more welcome question than, “How do I find the average of a row of data in Sheets?” The first question says, can you answer a quick question I can’t easily Google so I can keep moving forward with my work, while the second question says, can you do my thinking for me? 

One thing to qualify with this mindset is that you need to be able to make the right judgement for when you should take the time and make the effort to figure it out yourself and when you should ask for more direct help. Unfortunately, I don’t have an exact formula or logic system with which to determine every case. To figure this out yourself, you have to take into account the complexity of the work being asked of you, the urgency of its completion and whether it’s holding up other work of your own or bottlenecking other coworkers’ work. This should help you determine how much time and effort make sense for you to try to do the task on your own. 

Sometimes it actually is best to just ask a coworker if they have an example or can tell you how to do it. This is especially true for urgent, high visibility or high impact requests made by senior or executive leadership. The cost of taking the extra time and risk of potentially getting it wrong just isn’t worth it. 

How you figure out the right time to ask for more help versus asking the questions to figure it out on your own is something you learn over time. If you’re still learning it, talk to your manager as you go about these situations and ask if they agree with your approach or would do things differently. Eventually, you will be able to make the right calls for when it’s the right time to lean into this mindset and when to tap into others for help.

Skill #5: Measuring your impact.

This final skill speaks to the one which I wish I had focused more on throughout my first decade of working which is to measure the impact of the work you do on an ongoing, active basis. This is useful for a couple of reasons, both of which have to do with telling your own story.

The first is proving your performance at review time and in professional development conversations with your boss (i.e. getting the raise or promotion you deserve). The second is proving your performance to a new, potential employer (i.e. getting yourself a new job). 

Of these two reasons, I would argue the second is more important than the first. While having tangible, measurable facts to support how you have excelled at your job to share at review time or bolster a conversation you’ve initiated about getting a promotion, more often than not, companies don’t make those decisions based on performance. At least, it’s not based on performance alone. There are team budgets, personal relationships and politics, and all sorts of other factors that influence those decisions.

However, when it comes to finding a new job, it will always help improve your chances of getting noticed, getting interviewed and getting hired. Countless articles and forums speak to it in depth, but the short of it is, if you can say that your work moved the needle by X% on a KPI or helped save the team $XX over a given time period, then you will be head and shoulders above the other applicants vying for the position. 

Unfortunately, measuring impact is often easier said than done. Some roles, like sales, have measurement built into their job function. For most people, though, measurement isn’t built in or obvious, and it won’t happen at all unless you take the time to figure it out for yourself.

For strategists in particular I find it can be difficult to solve the measurement puzzle. How does one exactly quantify how that shift in brand tone led to a measurable result for the business or client? Can you know that the brand voice strategy alone caused that spike in performance, that no other factors have contributed to it? Incorporating testing into your work to demonstrate the efficacy of your strategies is a way to isolate the variable you are influencing. However, not everyone has the budget, time, resources or desire to run tests. 

For people in these circumstances, hopefully at least some of your clients or work has the opportunity to inject measurement into the project lifecycle. However, if not, sometimes you have to go with “looser” measurements. Rough estimates, qualified measurements or qualitative feedback versus hard numbers are sometimes all you have. This is still better than nothing and can still speak to the value of your work. 

That being said, being an advocate for measurement to your manager and team can hopefully inspire others to make more room for measurement. After all, good leaders will understand that if they can demonstrate the value of your work, it won’t just make you look good but them as well. 

A final thought.

As I noted earlier, this post actually started off as a list of ten underrated skills. Given how much I had to say about the first five, I decided to cull the list to make for a (hopefully) more digestible read. That being said, I plan to write a second part speaking to the other five as I believe there is value in highlighting those as well. 

In the meantime, if you’re looking for more advice, there is no shortage of it out there in any number of forms you could wish for, whether that be articles, videos, TikToks/Reels, LinkedIn posts, forums, etc.

For those who prefer reading to watching, here are a few places to start:

• Kickstart Your Career in the New Year: A Guide For Young Professionals and College Grads

• 10 Life Skills that Successful Young Professionals Should Have

• The Job Market is Rough Right Now. 7 Young Professionals Share What They Think Sets Them Apart.

Check out reddit and other forum threads like this one; they’re often filled with strong – if a bit unfiltered – perspectives