Author: Career Ready

In 2017, Amanda Becker made a life-changing decision. After a long career in book publishing, she’s currently pursuing an Accelerated Bachelor of Science in nursing degree at Marian University in Indianapolis. She also volunteers as a student intern at St. Vincent Hospital on various critical care units. I am a 39-year-old wife and mother of two young children (ages 5 and 2), who earned a B.S. degree in communications, journalism and publishing from the University of Southern Indiana. After graduation, I worked for the same employer, a book publisher, for…

Doing the job might not be enough; it turns out how you do the job—and, more importantly, how you do the job alongside co-workers—might be just as important. A 2016 Pew Research report found that “job categories with the highest growth tend to require higher social skills, analytic savvy and technical prowess.” Meanwhile, the number of jobs requiring “higher levels of manual or physical skills, such as machinery operation and physical labor, has changed relatively little,” reports Pew. Social skills, defined by Pew as “interpersonal, communications or management skills,” also…