Technical Skills

What are Technical Skills?

Technical skills are the prerequisite expertise needed to perform complex tasks. Although the scope of a complex task is wide, it entails any task in which the response requires more than a single interaction, otherwise known as a multicomponent task, such as computational or physical technology.

Practitioners versed in any subject’s technical aspects are called technicians, with the word denoting members of known occupations, such as engineering technicians, computer technicians, automobile technicians, market technicians, among many others.

Technical skills are relatively analytic and usually require specialized education and training. They are also considered esoteric, in that few outsiders can claim to possess such skills and knowledge. Technical skills may also refer to the expertise used by some individuals in combination with esoteric concepts of the market to conduct technical analyses to signal to trade.

Understanding Technical Skills

Most technical skills revolve around the manipulation of things, people, or symbols. Such skills are applicable at an empirical interface, which is a point at which a production system meets the intricacies of the material world, using bodies of knowledge, techniques, and technologies.

Depending on the occupation, technical skills use the material entities and relevant representations, such as test results, data, diagnoses, or images. For this reason, technical skills can convert material entities into symbols, indices, or signs.

For example, in the field of sciences, technical skills are applied to an array of instruments and protocols to reduce biological and physical phenomena to data and charts. In the same vein, technical skills in the medical field may be used alongside clinical analysis and other techniques to produce essays, descriptions, and counts of tissue samples.

In the automotive and factory sector, technical skills combined with computer systems, oscilloscopes, and software systems are used to create a representation of a product’s or an engine’s system functioning. Such skills are essentially practical because a technician is responsible for completing a designated task in the real world rather than in theory.

Positioning Technical Skills in Organizations

Technical skills are positioned in organizations in two main ways, namely:

1. Buffers

Some technical skills are required at the start of a serially interdependent, occupational division labor. Such skills generate a representation that becomes an input for another occupation’s work, usually professional work.

An example is expertise in roles such as science technicians, financial analysts, and engineering technicians in R&D departments. The individuals work hand in hand with professionals such as scientists, physicians, and engineers to provide more information and insights. While they produce data, they also buffer the professionals by providing them with the data from the empirical phenomena they are reputed to be competent.

2. Brokers

Individuals with technical skills may differ radically from those they serve, rendering their skills substantially irrelevant to other people’s works. Such skills include those possessed by factory technicians, computer technicians, and network administrators, who build, repair, and monitor complex technical systems.

The skills usually create and maintain the technical infrastructure of relevant data that enable other people to do their work. By only creating affordance for other people’s work and vice versa, such technical skills create a symbiotic work relationship between these skills and those they serve.

Education and Training of Technical Skills

Acquiring formal training is integral to the acquisition of advanced technical knowledge. The approach comprises advanced learning topics accompanied by a hands-on learning component. Most career fields list their top-on-the-list requirements as technical skills.

For example, the requirement is more conspicuous in career fields involving mathematical, engineering, computational, technological, and scientific capabilities. In the financial market realm, requisite capacity in technical analysis knowledge requires a wide range of mathematical and trend recognition apparatuses.

The expertise involves skills in applying the necessary historical data to produce the required information. Most technical analysis software uses market information, such as price, trade volume, and duration, to extrapolate directional outcomes in various financial instruments.

Example

Each discipline comes with its own underlying knowledge topics. For example, in finance, primary knowledge skills include quantitative analysis, computing skills, and market forecasting methods. Mathematical knowledge is also among the core requirements to produce components that predict future price components, such as chart analysis and model trends.

Key Trends

The onset of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the continuous growth of technologies worldwide and within local economies dictate that new occupations demand more technical skills. Moreover, self-directed learning as a new mode of learning delivery for which learnability will be crucial to the foreseeable future is essential.

Technology-induced job losses turning out to be optimistic and project a net increase in jobs. Workers looking for emerging jobs in other industries may need to learn technical skills to fit in. It is premised on the fact that automation is replacing jobs that demand a higher level of cognitive skills. Continuous learning of technical skills is the mainstay of current job skills.

More Resources

CFI offers the Commercial Banking & Credit Analyst (CBCA)™ certification program for those looking to take their careers to the next level. To keep learning and advancing your career, the following resources will be helpful:

• Advance Technical Analysis
• Hard Skills
• Financial Modeling for Beginners
• How to List Skills in Your Resume
• See all career resources