Because of constant changes in job market demands, a skill you have been learning for sometime now might be rendered obsolete by the time you use it in the workplace. It is this mercuriality that makes one want to examine what is really essential to be successful.

Over the last years, contact centers have been providing employment for a lot of undergraduates, fresh graduates, and other job seekers, Being customer-centered, work in a contact center requires one to deliver information well and establish trust while talking to clients with different needs, issues, and of course, temperaments. As such, good communication skills have become crucial in securing a post in the industry. Aside from this, the major task of handling customer concerns requires analytical skills to determine the problem and swiftly offer solutions. And when the company grows and expands to other countries, extending their reach to different customers of diverse cultures and social mores, agents are also expected to be fluent in a foreign language other than English to ensure not just stable employment, but also a good paycheck.

The contact center, or call center, is just one facet of the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. Outsourcing means obtaining external manpower to carry out business processes like human resources. Solutions for technological needs like software development can also be outsourced. This has led to a large demand in the field of computer sciences, making yet another kind of language valuable to learn—namely, the programming language.

But as technological needs are met, and technology advances, we could lose some of these jobs, especially the ones that are replaceable by artificial intelligence. According to Telegraph, in a study conducted by Oxford, routinary jobs have the highest chance to be assigned to machines that are programmed to do tasks. The thing is, there are a lot of them and humans will eventually have no choice but to look somewhere else for jobs. They will have to develop other skills which cannot be automated by the most advanced machines that can possibly be invented.

So what skills are those? Of course, these should be ones that are automation-proof (or at least very difficult to automate), or those that have to do with establishing meaningful human connection. In this case, good communication skills are still the best to master—from doing eloquent presentations and handling conflicts with diplomacy, to being assertive, considerate and having overall empathy towards others. Besides, it is expected in any job.

It is still important to be able to keep up with the changes. The educational system must be technology-oriented, but should not completely do away with tradition, which has been, and still is, the basis of what we humans have reached so far in the realm of sciences.