Three skills for the next decade in tech

Insights, inspiration and exclusive interviews from the global LEAP community – in your inbox every week. 

This week we’re quoting…

Julian Tan (Director of Corporate Strategy at BT Group)

What Julian said: 

"Empathy, curiosity, and adaptability will be the most important leadership currency in my opinion."

Three traits for a changing world 

If you're building a company or scaling a team – or simply trying to build a meaningful career in tech – there's a good chance you've asked yourself some version of this question recently:

What should I be getting better at?

But it’s a difficult question to answer. Tech professionals of the past could learn new skills and build expertise, and eventually become the person with all the answers. But now that we have AI, access to knowledge is becoming less of a differentiator. 

Information is abundant, and answers are available on demand. Technical skills are still important, of course – but they’re not enough on their own. 

As Julian said: 

"AI is upending everything we know about the value that white collar workers will bring into the workforce. Knowledge is becoming a commodity, so the differentiators over the next five years certainly won’t be about who knows the most."

You could be unsettled by that – or you could look at it from another angle. 

If knowledge is becoming more accessible, the qualities that sit around knowledge become more valuable. Instead of what you know, your capability lies in how you think, how you lead, and how you respond to change.

Julian told us there are three traits worth deliberately cultivating.

1. Build your empathy muscle 

AI is going to make human skills more important. As automation takes on more routine work, leaders will spend more of their time aligning teams, building trust, understanding customers, and making judgement calls that can't be outsourced to a model.

"Even as AI and agents take over more tasks, businesses will always be about people – whether in the people they serve or the people involved in running the business."

Empathy is a professional capability: 

• It helps founders understand customers better than competitors do. 
• It helps managers retain talent. 
• It helps leaders navigate difficult conversations and build cultures that people want to be part of.

So ask yourself how often you’re trying to understand what others are experiencing before trying to solve the problem. 

2. Stay curious for longer

Loads of people worry they’re lagging behind on learning new things. But that’s not a bad thing – because believing you’ve already learnt enough is a much bigger risk. 

Technology rewards expertise, but it can also trap people inside old assumptions. The most successful founders and operators we meet are those who remain students long after they've achieved success.

Julian put it like this:

"While intelligence is commoditising, the core skill of interrogating it is only becoming more important. Asking the right questions and challenging assumptions are key and true curiosity unlocks these."

Curiosity stops experience from turning into complacency. It's what pushes someone to explore a new technology before everyone else; to question a business model that appears to be working; to ask why a customer behaves differently than expected.

In a world changing this quickly, curiosity allows us to let go of the need to have all the answers, and focus instead on constantly finding better questions. 

3. Practise adaptability before you need it

You can see adaptability most clearly during periods of change. But that adaptability is built long before change actually happens. 

Adaptable leaders don't wait until disruption forces them to evolve. They actively expose themselves to new ideas, new technologies and new ways of thinking. They experiment. They update their opinions. They’re always willing to be wrong.

"The world is moving at a pace we haven’t seen before, and leaders will need to be comfortable rethinking their own views, embracing new tools, and leaning into the art of the possible."

The leaders who thrive over the next decade will be the ones who are most prepared to meet it.

A career advantage that compounds

Empathy, curiosity and adaptability are not talents you're born with.

They’re habits, or choices. 

And unlike technical expertise (which can get outdated really fast), these qualities grow over time. 

So never stop learning about people and possibilities – and about yourself. In a world where everyone wants to be the best, choose instead to be the most open. It might just be the safest investment you can make in your career. 

Read our full interview with Julian Tan on the blog: Building for the AI era starts with infrastructure