What career skills are needed for success? Meta’s Sandhya Devanathan explains

Devanathan will transition to her new role on 1 January 2023. Currently, she is working as the head of Meta’s gaming vertical for Asia-Pacific. Joining the Facebook’s parent company in 2016, Devanathan has spent almost seven years with Meta. 

In the March 2020 blog post, she wrote, “For soft skills, the ability to deal with ambiguity is key. If you’re looking for a playbook or a clear roadmap, that likely won’t happen. You need to have a certain level of independence and the ability to quickly adjust to change.”

According to Meta’s new India head, the second career skill required is ‘collaboration and communication. She said this skill is important during the time where where many companies are shifting to full time remote work, or giving employees the option to return to the office or work from home, or take a hybrid approach.

“Communication and collaboration are critical when you don’t have the opportunity to meet regularly in person,” she stated. 

The third important soft skill is ‘resilience’, Devanathan wrote in her blog post, adding that, “You may deal with people who move slower than you or need to pivot or stop their work with you to focus on their own challenges and priorities.”

“Even if you have broad awareness, there could be sudden industry headwinds or a whole economy could collapse. You live in markets in Asia that are vibrant but also somewhat volatile, so having resilience is very important,” she further wrote. 

Apart from soft skills, Devanathan also mentioned hard skills which are important to achieve success in career. According to her, it is important to have a ‘deeply analytical mindset even for non-technical roles’ and ‘planning ability and execution rigor’.

She also cited an example of above mentioned hard skills. 

“For example, beyond the present work and the next marketing campaign, we have to think about data-driven advice on markets to expand into. We need to consider things like cross-border insights, roll-out strategies, and advice on digital transformation,” the Meta’s India head said. 

“We look for people who are able to set a strong strategy, but setting strategy is useless if you can’t break it down into what needs to get done today and what needs to play out longer term. Foresight should be matched equally by planning and execution,” she added.