If 2026 is the year where you take upskilling to the next level, start by learning about meta skills.
Often when we think about the skills we want to learn to aid us in our professional lives, we tend to start with one skill at a time. For example, we consider how a major new ability may demand significant planning, resources and patience to master. Like learning a new programming language or finally being able to understand and use a brand new technology.
When tackling complex new skills, one of the biggest barriers to success can be the fatigue and anxiety that accompanies the endeavour as you become frustrated by a lack of progress, eventually throwing in the towel.
But that’s where meta skills can come in. Defined as fundamental, higher-order capabilities, they empower professionals to learn, adapt and grow their skills with confidence. With that in mind, what are some of the more important meta skills you could learn to enhance your career and how might you further develop them?
Self-awareness
It stands to reason that if you don’t have a solid understanding of how you come across in a professional capacity, you are likely to put your foot in it eventually, in a way that could impact your standing or career aspirations. For example, if you can’t recognise your weaknesses then you will repeat mistakes, or if you can’t identify your strengths then you will lose out on opportunities to highlight your potential.
Self-awareness is a crucial meta skill that enables you to leverage the areas of your broader skillset that help to better contribute to the working environment – whether through focused emotional regulation, productive communication, or the setting of reasonable boundaries, among others.
A suggested way to develop skills in this area include reflection exercises that encourage you to briefly focus on the day’s experiences and corresponding behaviours, as a means of isolating and identifying patterns. Additionally, you could request consistent feedback every couple of months from peers and management, so there is a clear idea formed of how you are performing, the areas in which you are doing well and where there is room for improvement.
Conscious collaboration
Defined as an action in which you purposefully drive meaningful and productive team engagement, conscious collaboration is key to improving a range of other more highly recognised skills, such as communication, idea sharing, negotiating and problem-solving.
By deliberately putting yourself in a mindset where you seek out others, to share resources, strategies and experiences, you firmly embed yourself in the minds of others as a loyal, reliable and forward-thinking professional. Additionally, by exposing yourself to the thought processes, systems and day-to-day lives of your co-workers you inevitably pick up new skills and ways of doing things, diversifying work and potentially creating new opportunities.
Conscious collaboration is a vital skill that lends itself to a host of other abilities and is arguably one of the harder skills to improve, as it depends on the availability of others.
However, to improve in this area, try reaching out to peers about establishing a set time to collaborate on new projects or tasks. Speak to your employer about breaking down silos and if that fails, consider geting in touch with online or in-person communities in your field to share ideas, build skill and connect.
Innovation
It can be difficult sometimes to properly understand the difference between a soft skill and a meta skill and there are multiple schools of thought on how this differentiation is actually broken down.
One suggestion is that a soft skill or indeed a hard skill tends to be singular in that it addresses one or two main challenges. Whereas meta skills are far broader, foundational and essentially are the trick to ‘learning how to learn’, so you actually progress in your upskilling endeavours.
Innovation, as a meta skill, is an ideal example of this, as it enables you to develop skills in line with a transforming world, engage with new concepts and tech, and keep one eye firmly on the future as you look to upskill for promotions or even a potential career change.
So how do you make yourself more innovative? That is an inherited trait right? Maybe not. At its core, being innovative is about questioning what exists, what could exist and where you play a part.
If you want to improve your innovation skills, align yourself with people who are more curious than you are. Watch how they problem-solve, how they address an issue critically, the thought processes behind why they suggest something new and how they put that plan into action.
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