Adjacent Skills

If your career is on a plateau, or you think you are ready to explore new alternatives, nurturing your adjacent skills might be a good starting point for what’s next.

Deep expertise in a domain might lead to a successful career, but it is also a rigid approach which may later limit your opportunities. Adjacent skills can open doors and foster serendipity in a career.

Adjacent skills are skills that are close or related to the ones you already have. Instead of acquiring completely unrelated skills, developing adjacent skills is a way to complement what you already know.

Examples of adjacent skills –

To discover your adjacent skills, simply brainstorm as many potential new skills relevant to your current job as possible.

Once you have a list of potential skills, choose one to focus on and ask yourself the following questions – (1) how curious am I about this skill? (2) based on my current skill set, how easy will it be to acquire this skill? (3) based on my current work environment, how useful will this skill be?

If you find a skill matching the three criteria – you have enough curiosity about it, it will be easy for you to acquire the skill, and it will still be useful even in your current job – then you’ve discovered your immediate adjacent skill!

Adjacent skills are a great way to widen your career perspective by building a multi-faceted profile. Further, as adjacent skills are developed, one skill may lead to another.