The question everyone was asking this National Interview Week

I’ve been fortunate to support Imployable’s National Interview Week for a number of years through PSR’s social value programme. It’s always one of my favourite volunteering activities because it gives you the opportunity to have honest conversations with young people about their career goals, confidence and aspirations through virtual mock interviews. This year, PSR and our suppliers were able to support 26 students during National Interview Week 2026

What struck me most this year was that regardless of location, experience or career aspiration, the same question kept coming up:

“How do I know what skills I need for the job I want?”

It’s a brilliant question and one that I don’t think we talk about enough, especially with young people. We’re often encouraged to develop our skills but rarely shown how to identify which skills are actually worth investing our time in. My advice is always the same:

Stop guessing and start researching.

When people think about career development, they often focus on the question: “What skills should I develop next?”. The problem is that many of us answer that question based on assumptions. We look at what other people are doing, follow generic careers advice or make educated guesses about what employers might want but here’s a much simpler approach – Let employers tell you.

Instead of focusing solely on vacancies you can apply for today, spend some time looking at the roles you’d love to be doing in six months, a year or even three years from now. ONS research conducted in 2022 found that millions of people already have the skills to move into occupations beyond their current role. The challenge is often not capability, but recognising those transferable skills and understanding how they align to employer demand

Pull together a selection of job adverts from different organisations and look for the patterns. What skills keep appearing? What experience is consistently being asked for? Which qualifications are genuinely essential, and which are simply desirable? Very quickly, you’ll start to see a picture emerge. The job adverts stop being vacancies and become market research  and this is where AI can be a really useful tool.

AI isn’t there to do the thinking for you, but to help you make sense of what you’re finding. Once you’ve gathered a few job adverts, you can use AI tools to compare them, pull out the common themes and highlight the skills or experience that keep coming up. It can help turn a long list of requirements into something much clearer and more manageable. The important bit is to stay curious and sense check what comes back. AI can speed up the research, but your judgement is still what turns that insight into a development plan that feels right for you.

Build your roadmap, not someone else’s

One of the reasons I like this approach is that it turns a vague ambition into a practical plan. Rather than wondering whether you’re focusing on the right things, you can identify the skills and experience you already have, those you could develop relatively quickly and longer term gaps that may require additional learning or experience. You’ve effectively created a career roadmap based on evidence rather than guesswork and that matters, because our time and energy are limited, regardless of which career stage we’re at. The more focused we can be in our development, the more likely we are to make meaningful progress.

Start with the End Goal

So here’s my challenge. Find five job adverts for a role you’d genuinely love to do in the next five years. Don’t think about whether you’re qualified yet, just look for the patterns. You might discover that the gap between where you are today and where you want to be is much smaller than you think and if there are gaps, you’ll know exactly where to focus your time and energy next.