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**Priya Rathod** (0:00)
Welcome back to Job Search Stories, I'm Priya. And today we're talking about something really important, and that's skills.

**Donna Bungard** (0:07)
I'm Jen, a career coach and your go-to gal for all things career advice.

**Priya Rathod** (0:10)
And I'm Priya. We've got your back as you take on the wild ride of job hunting.

**Donna Bungard** (0:15)
Welcome to Job Search Stories.

**Priya Rathod** (0:17)
Here today with me is Donna Bungard, our Director of Accessibility, a skills first expert at Indeed, and her most important title, which is A Good Friend of Mine. So Donna, welcome.

**Donna Bungard** (0:28)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited for this conversation and to just get to spend some time together.

**Priya Rathod** (0:33)
We hear terms like upskilling, reskilling, soft skills, hard skills, AI skills all the time. And the word, especially now, is getting used in a lot of different ways. So before we get into any of that, at its most fundamental level, how do you define a skill?

**Donna Bungard** (0:51)
A skill is the ability to get something done. And it's not about how you learn the skill or where you learn the skill or even the method you use to get it done. If you can get the something, whatever that is, done, you have the skill for that. It's very basic. And I feel like we overthink it sometimes. It's just, do you get the job done? Yes. Okay. Checkbox. Keep going.

**Priya Rathod** (1:14)
In that vein, we're seeing that job seekers have more skills than ever. Why do employers keep saying there's a skills shortage while job seekers say there aren't enough jobs? How can both of those things be true at the same time?

**Donna Bungard** (1:26)
It's a couple of things. First of all, I think a lot of it is a translation issue. An example I always use for about myself is, I used to work on small rural agencies, and we would do customer profiles like nobody's business. My first day in corporate, somebody asked me about a persona. I said, oh, what's that? And immediately, I saw their eyes just hardened. We misinterpreted each other. I had the skills to do the job. I could get it done. What we called it was different. And I think part of it is that translation piece, the other part of it is right now, the work landscape is changing. It is rapidly changing. We have technology changes. We have various pressures on organizations to adapt on the fly. And sometimes what employers have used in the past is what's on that job description, but it might not be the skills that they need moving forward. They're looking for emerging skills. They're looking for adaptability. They're looking for flexibility and communication. And all of these really hard-to-define, sometimes odd-to-communicate skill sets. And a lot of individuals have a tendency to downplay the role of their emotional intelligence in the workplace, downplay their ability to have conversations like this, downplay those pieces because, well, it's just what I do. It's fine. And the truth of the matter is, those are the skills that are desperately becoming more and more and more and more needed.

**Priya Rathod** (2:53)
So Donna, you mentioned a couple of really important things. I think first is in this world of AI, there are so many human-based skills that are becoming increasingly important, and that is communication, empathy, leadership, the ability to pivot, deal with different personalities. And so when I'm looking at job postings, I see hundreds of different skills listed. What do you think employers are actually trying to find? And why do you think so many job seekers keep missing it?

**Donna Bungard** (3:18)
That is a really important piece you're touching on, and that is that employers sometimes are not sure what they need. They need the talent that's going to have a mix of things. So sometimes they will throw every skill they could possibly wish for on there, knowing that every applicant that they speak to is going to have a different compensation of which ones are their strengths and which ones they're weaker at. Now the challenge that really is impacting both sides of the marketplace, there are tons of applicants out there that don't see that as a wish list, don't see as a checklist and that if I don't have all the skills, I'm not going to apply, it's not worth the time. When the truth of the matter is, a lot of these employers are putting everything out there, knowing that Priya is going to have of these 50 skills, 40 of them, but those 10 are going to be weak. Whereas Donna is only going to have 25 really strong ones, but then the other 20, they're not going to be super, then these five are going to be really, really weak. And they're going to see that each individual is going to have that different composition, and that's where the interview comes in, and that's where they're going to be like, okay, wait a second, so this person's personality and communication style will play really well off of this person, and then the hard skills match up to make up for each other's weaknesses. And they end up seeing where, oh, but this person has this composition and this one has that. And they end up kind of working together and composing a team that is dynamic and can play off of each other's strengths more effectively. But you need to apply first. And that's the key thing is that we can't keep getting caught up on the idea that we need 100 percent of everything to work out.