The COVID-19 has made the world realise that we should learn and adapt to new skills and changes to sustain the pandemic.

From schools to companies, every organisation had to recreate new strategies and policies during the pandemic to help their business and institutions survive. To stand up in this pandemic, individuals will need to reskill and upskill their talents, which will be discussed below in this article. In the following article, we offer eight skills an individual can apply in their daily activities throughout their lives within a post-COVID-19 world. The skills that would be crucial in this pandemic are:

1. Asychological Resilience

Resilience is about having the strength to recover from hardships quickly, and psychological resilience is about being mentally and emotionally prepared for a crisis. Having a stable psychological resilience is to stay calm in a disaster situation and try to find solutions to get over it. During this pandemic, the world needs to develop psychological resilience among every people to come back and carry on with the learning and work world in these difficult times.

2. Adaptability

Adaptability is a flexible skill that enables people to cope with new changes and behaviours rapidly concerning situations. Lately, there have been many changes happening in the world due to the pandemic, and people should be able to adapt to the latest changes and become accustomed to new etiquettes.

With this pandemic, there has been a significant change in both the work and education world that has taken place. Work and learning take place from home nowadays, and without being able to adapt to these changes quickly, the world would be tough on the people.

• 3. Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is where people can positively control their own emotions and overcome their challenges. Unfortunately, through this pandemic, all businesses have incurred losses. To restart their work, the individuals should realise that emotional intelligence would be an excellent benefit for their relationship with their employers and employees. Therefore, understanding human nature would be the most appropriate skill in this pandemic.

• 4. Cybersecurity

With the new system technology, cybercriminals are getting more sophisticated. With this pandemic, more people are getting exposed to online transactions, and this is where cybercriminals are taking advantage and have been targeting people more than ever. An appropriate skill that would be helpful after this pandemic would be cybersecurity skill, where the person can identify cybercrime, its consequences and avoid such things. Being cybersecurity literate would make online shopping more secure and more accessible.

• 5. Digital skills

According to the UN statistics, they declared that online transactions jump to $26.7 trillion due to COVID-19. Digital skill is the ability to manage digital devices, applications and network to enable better communication for work and education purposes. Therefore, the critical skill for post-COVID-19 would be digital literacy as it includes designing and programming new software strategies, including online presentation, being friendly and sociable with camera for virtual interviews.

• 6. Creativity and Innovation

Creativity is the act of visualising and imagining new themes and strategies, while innovation creates and applies your creative skills in the world. After this pandemic, the world will need human creativity and innovation to stand and maintain the economy of all the countries. Businesses have already developed innovations such as working from home, home delivery, or even distance learning. Therefore, creativity and innovation will be an essential skill and require a practical skill for a post-COVID 19 world.

• 7. Critical thinking

As our global economy restores from the COVID-19 pandemic, critical thinking would be an appropriate skill for the economy as critical thinking is the unbiased analysis of factual evidence to form a pre-judgement without letting emotions affecting the decision. The economy will need to rely on individuals who can objectively assess the information from different sources to clarify whether the evidence is credible and realistic for future endeavours, as not all information could be trusted. However, critical thinking will help to secure upcoming decision-making.   

• 8. Psychological support and reassurance

In the pandemic, many people around the world have lost their beloved ones. People have seen their dear ones suffer a deadly disease, and they could not help it. Some people have even suffered from COVID-19, and luckily their health was stabilised after some days, where some lost their jobs. Amongst all these, the individual’s mental health has been on a low level where they feel stressed, sad, isolated, scared and depressed at the same time. A fitting skill from society would be psychological support and reassurance to the suffering people. This will help boost themselves both mentally and emotionally to fight and survive this pandemic. This will also support the individuals to forget the dreadful past and move ahead for better health and life.

COVID-19 has fastened the process of embracing an entirely digitised world to re-create the best of the global economy and learning. To meet these skills in an individual, they must develop a talent strategy that would improve their critical thinking and cognitive capabilities and their social and emotional skills together with flexibility and resilience, which has been highlighted in the above article. Developing these skills will help the individuals to live a recovering life in the post-COVID-19 world.

Narmeen Nasari, Student of Middlesex University (Mauritius) and YUVA Intern