What are technical skills?

Visual that illustrates what are the key technical skills to be successful

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Technical skills are the areas you need to be successful in a technical career or to best use technology on a job. Also, these days, that is most jobs.

Working with technology is for sure a crucial skill to have. Interestingly, however, many essential technical skills extend beyond technology itself.

For instance, the ability to collaborate and execute tasks within a small team is a vital yet often overlooked technical competency. Strong teamwork and collaboration skills are integral to succeeding in tech-driven environments, where diverse views and group efforts drive innovation.

It’s important to recognize that technical skills encompass more than just technical knowledge. Also, they include interpersonal abilities and skills.

Let’s explore these broader aspects of technical skills and the key points to consider in your tech journey.

Considerations when defining technical skills

As technology continues to advance, so do the various interpretations of it. With this evolving definition comes a shift in the understanding necessary for mastering the technical proficiency needed to effectively work with technology. Here are a couple of these considerations that can help

There are many different ways people talk about technical skills

Some people believe that technical skills should just be defined as the hard technical abilities to work with tech. These are things like being strong at programming or information systems.

Others believe it should be all of the abilities you should have to work with tech. This then includes items like soft skills and problem solving.

However at CyberForward Academy we believe in this wider interpretation, but we also believe it is not just that you are an expert in one area or another, but it is your mix and balance that most matter.

For example, if you look at Tom Brady during his NFL combine his hard physical abilities were average at best. However it was his more subtle mix of skills, including work effort to build them, that gave him his epic results. this is easier to see in sports, but it is very applicable to tech.

In the world of education, schools use multiple frameworks and standards to define technical and overall career ready skills. If you are in school, you should understand these standards and their alignment to technical skills.

21st century skills – This is a set of skills deemed as critical in the modern world. These skills are what many schools look to develop in their career and technical education programs.
Career ready practices – This is a set of modern professional practices and associated skills to make the most of your tech skills.

Achieving technical proficiency is critical

Technical proficiency is how well you use tech skills to meet your goals and objectives with them. In essence, becoming tech proficient is the most important part of using technology skills.

So what are technical skills?

So what are technical skills you ask? It breaks down into 4 categories. These include your understanding of how to navigate tech, hard skills working with technology, interpersonal skills, and productivity.

Let’s explore them all a bit more.

1. Technology Navigation Skills

There are a couple of aspects to this. Most importantly, it includes how you navigate technology at each of the common stages of technical development. At CyberForward, we use a Learn, train, work™ staging system.

Learning Phase

In the learning phase you will not have an understanding of the big picture or how to navigate technology. People often call this good old experience.

Understanding the manner in which technology operates and the largest technology components is important. However, more important is learning how to navigate these items and make informed decisions in order to meet your technology objectives.

For those that have been in technology for a while, these skills often do come with experience. However, if you are new to technology, you do not have this experience to lean on. So you need to first experience and then learn these critical technology skills.

The best way to get these technical skills is to take technical foundation training or specific foundation training in a tech area. This training covers the basics of how technology works, what it looks like, and how people work with it. It helps new learners connect the dots so they can better navigate within it.

For some, this will be simply a better understanding of how to get more from the technology you are using. For others, it will aid you in developing technology solutions. Finally, for those looking to learn technology, it will provide you insight on how to continue and make the best learning decisions for moving forward. With this in mind, you will then need to understand how to train the new tech skills you have learned.

Training Phase

In the training phase, it is all about building proficiency with the knowledge you have gained about tech skills. You will want to find training programs that provide realistic environments that continue providing knowledge but also let you practice. Also, you will want to assess your level of proficiency on a regular basis to see where you are at and how to plan moving forward. Once you start to become effective with you tech skills, then you are ready to start working.

Work Phase

The work phase is just what it sounds like. You are working and using your skills in a tech job. The important thing to remember here is that in order to even get an entry level tech job, you still need some level or proficiency.

Learning this at the beginning of your journey is important so you have reasonable expectations about getting a job with your skills. So now that you understand the importance of a foundation and the development process, you are ready to move on to looking at what are hard technical skills.

2. The hard skills to work with technology

So in order to work with tech you do actually need to know how to work with the technology itself. To do this, you have to understand and master the following technical capabilities, skills and aptitudes.

Further, do note that in almost all instances you will still need to have soft skills to be successful in application of these tasks. As a result, we will present the hard and soft attributes to each one below.

Analysis based technology skills

These technical skills are often a combination of human based skills with hard skills in understanding technology. Also, the good news with these is they can take less experience to master because the analytical abilities take less time to learn.

Analyze technology: These technical skills have to do with finding the right technology for a job. Further, these tasks often have human elements associated with communicating this technology analysis to others.
Research technology: Another important aspect of tech is performing research on the best applications for it in a given situation. This again has soft skills elements in combination with also understanding the technology itself.

Building and implementing technology

So some of the most important hard skills when working with tech are associated with how to build and implement it. Further, as a result, since these hard skills can take more time to learn, they often lead to higher paying jobs.

Architect technology: You must design tech before you can use it. These are some of the most technical roles in the discipline but crucial.
Engineer or develop technology: This is using technology to create something. For example an application developer who engineers or develops applications from code.
Implementer of technology: Once we research and architect the tech, we need to implement it. These skills have to do with things such as project management and simple execution.

Supporting technology once in place

Skills in this area are what happen after a technology is implemented within an environment. As a result, they often require someone to again have both soft and hard skills to master them.

This is because people with these skills will need to understand both the technology as well as how to communicate with others about them once being used.

Support technology: There are technologists that are in place to provide support to the users of technology. These are often support technicians or those that work on help desks.
Operate technology: There are engineers that spend their days operating technology each day. This may be a piece of equipment like a router or for example an x-ray machine.
Administer technology: There are generally people in charge of the overall configuration and users of a piece of tech. These administrators are generally more senior operators of the equipment.
Fix technology: Sometimes tech simply breaks. So there are definitely specific skills around being able to fix what has broken and bring it back into production.

Technical skills to use technology

This is everyone who works in a job in our digital economy. Whether you are a farmer, a scientist, or a parent you will use technology. It is important to not just use technology, but to learn to use it effectively. Because of this, you will want to have many of the hard skills discussed above to ensure the best performance in any job.

Finally, to get there, you will want to learn the different ways to learn tech to help in building these hard skills.

There are many related disciplines that you will want to learn skills within to be strong in tech. These include cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and data science.

Cybersecurity skills: A big part of cybersecurity is securing technology. This includes preventing and detecting attacks that try to exploit technology. Learning these prevention and detection skills are important to being a well rounded technician.

Artificial Intelligence: Not a conversation goes by these days that does not discuss AI in some way. You will want to get skills with how to use technology to implement AI, as well as how to complement it with it.

Data Science: Data is the blood of any technology. As a result, data related skills and techniques are critical to working best with technology.

Business continuity skills: With the heavy reliance businesses have on technology to keep operations running, business continuity is important. These skills are all about understanding how to keep an organization up and running and recovery opportunities when it is not.

3. The technical skills to work with people

The big consideration with technical skills and using technology is that it helps people work. To be successful working with people in a technical career, there are many other skills you must have. These people related skills are as important to being able to work with the tech. They include:

Communication skills: When working with tech, you will constantly be explaining it and teaching it to others. This requires communication skills both verbal and written.
Learning skills: Tech is constantly changing and evolving, so you must be constantly learning how this has happened.
Teaching skills: In line with it always changing, you will constantly be having to teach others how the tech has changed.
Team skills: Technology is very rarely used in isolation. The reality is that teams are a big part of working with technology. Teams design technology, engineer it, or administer it. The better you work in teams, the more effective you will be in technology.
Leadership skills: Someone needs to lead all of these technical teams. Both from a people perspective but also from an expertise perspective.

4. The ability to execute is a key technical skill

Your understanding of how to navigate tech is an important tech skill. So is being able to help people with it and collaborate.

However the most crucial aspect of technology is your ability to accomplish work with it.

There are two aspects to this, execution technical skills and your overall proficiency.

Here are some of the execution technical skills that will make you better when in a technology career.

Execution technical skills

Project management: To succeed in execution, one must manage projects effectively. This includes effectively managing scope, schedule and budget.
Use technology: We mentioned this one in the tech specific skills but we will mention it again. You have to know how to learn and then use a technology in order to support you in the associated task at hand.
Assessment capability: A big part of tech skills is being able to measure and assess them in yourself and others in order to meet your goals.
Training capability: Before you can best execute with tech skills you will need to practice your use of them. This includes understanding how to set up training activities to actually practice.
Hard working: In tech, you must constantly iterate to implement things correctly. You will need to be a hard worker to work through these iterations and make progress.
Patient: Technology can be frustrating. So you will need to be patient in order to be successful in using it.

Next steps to know what are technical skills

Want to learn more about how to develop your technical skills. A good starting place is to learn how to measure your proficiency using them. You can also get your tech worker readiness score™ now with CyberForward Academy to help see where you are at and the right programs to move forward.