Laurence Shatkin, a career information expert, recently correlated income and the occupations to see which skills are likely to be the most valuable in the future. With so much concern over losing jobs to off-shoring, outsourcing, and automation in the US, this list identifies skills that will probably still be needed by employers a long time from now. Interestingly, many of the skills that appear at the top of his list are "soft skills." Shatkin says the are so valuable because they are so hard to automate and often are needed in-person. Skills with the lowest correlation included equipment maintenance, repairing, and installation jobs, which require continuous training and are likely to not be as in-demand in the future. Appearing first on his list, was judgement and decision making and, today, we wanted to take a deeper look at hiring demand for this skill.

In August 2013, just over 208,000 jobs that were available online required decision making skills, a 1% year-over-year growth. Although, this may not seem like a great increase, the number of jobs requiring this soft skill increased almost 200% in the past 4 years. Considering that there are millions of jobs being advertised online each month, would you expect the percentage of jobs requiring decision making skills to be higher?

It's not surprising that management occupations would commonly require decision making skills. These occupations, which include marketing managers, financial managers (branch or department), and operations managers, represented 22% of hiring demand for people with good decision making skills. Other fields with high demand were IT, sales, business and financial operations, and office and administrative.

Hiring Demand for Decision Making Skills – Top 5 Occupational Fields

Do you predict any trends in decision making skills? Will they become more desired by employers? For what jobs?

Source: WANTED Analytics