Whether you are trying to find a better job with more pay or just trying to figure out how to get your business off the ground, there are many skills that you need. I'm sure you've heard it a million times before, but having a well-rounded skill set is important.

Trying to master as many subjects as possible will give you the upper hand when applying for jobs. Before investing into several online courses, we think these 5 skills can help turn you into a versatile well rounded individual.

I cannot stress enough on this particular subject. Learning how to code should be on the top of anyone’s list who is currently in high school, undergrad or regardless of where they are in their career. As a start, I recommend learning Python. It is the easiest language to learn (if you focus and dedicate yourself to doing so). It takes barely 6 months to strengthen the core foundation. What you can do after learning this skill - sky's the limit. More so, it is said that learning how to code will help you to reverse engineer and break any complex problem into simpler blocks to help solve the same. Here is a video I thought would be a great way to introduce you to the basics. There are many online courses on this which will be covered in another post.

Every job nowadays requires you to know Excel. From the simple sum functions all the way to complex pivot tables, vlookups and sumifs, one should learn this skill until they think they are a 5 on 10. I say 5 out of 10 because Excel has endless functionalities along with automating capabilities through macros. Excel can help remove a lot of manual work. Individuals and businesses can benefit from this by spinning data sets around by providing simple dashboards to help understand the overall problem anyone is trying to solve.

Are Walmart and Amazon on your dream list to work for? If so, then better make sure you learn how to write SQL queries. For anyone who isn’t familiar with SQL, it is a language that you can use to extract data from large databases. Most data science and analytics teams write simple to complex SQL queries to extract data along with building automated dashboards for other teams to perform various analyses. However, companies like Amazon and Walmart require many other roles (apart from the data science and analytics teams) to know SQL. This is because the data science teams are always stretched thin and do not have the time to perform ad hoc data pulls and other analysis which can otherwise be performed by any one if they know the SQL basics.

Whether you are part of the marketing, creative, business development or finance teams, knowing the basics of financial statements like the P&L and Balance Sheet is extremely important. If one is able to understand how a company makes money, how much cash it has on hand and how expenses are paid out, this can help streamline a lot of budgeting and forecasting questions that would otherwise only be answered by the finance teams. 

Last but not the least, this one is my favorite. With social media growing exponentially along with other marketing channels playing a vital role in helping any brand or business grow, every individual should understand the importance of marketing along with the various types of mediums involved in marketing. Marketing nowadays includes (but is not limited to) putting advertisements on TV, Google & Facebook, posting on Instagram and Twitter, billboards (known as OOH - Out of Home), advertisements on Netflix and Hulu (Known as OTT - Over the Top along with helping with organic and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) rankings on Google via keywords and keywords bidding. Apart from just knowing what marketing is about, it is also good to understand what tools marketers use in order to gauge their success. One important tool that is widely used by many businesses is Google Analytics. I highly encourage you all to research into this and the important KPIs to help understand marketing effectiveness and ROI.