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Gartner data found that the number of skills required for a single job was increasing by 10% per year. And one-third of the skills listed in an average 2017 job posting would not be relevant by 2021. Gartner also found that role-based skills planning wasn’t helping organizations develop the right employee skill sets. Grouping unrelated skills doesn’t build the skills that will create competitive advantage.

But several experts have ideas about what those necessary skills of the future will be. As organizations continue to operate in a pandemic and plan for the future, here are some of the essential skills that employees will need:

Self-direction

In the midst of so much change, employees are going to need to take ownership of their roles and be highly self-directed, much like entrepreneurs within their organizations, says Devin Fidler, founder and CEO of Rethinkery Foresight, a business and change management consulting firm. Fidler says employees, especially at the entry-level, are going to increasingly need “to captain their own careers, [and have] a sort of DIY kind of hacking mentality.”

As roles and organizations quickly evolve, the traditional training methods to develop necessary skills don’t exist in the same way. Employees are going to have to be active participants in identifying the skills, resources, and support they need to do their jobs and collaborate with their companies to get them.

Digital capabilities

Eighty-five percent of companies recently surveyed by McKinsey said they had accelerated digitization. Employees are going to have to be comfortable with digital technologies, says Julia Lamm, workforce strategy partner at PwC. Employees are not only going to need to be comfortable using digital technologies, ranging from collaboration software to videoconferencing, but they’re also going to need to accept its role in evaluating metrics. Analytics was the No. 1 area of digital investment for HR executives in a recent PwC survey.