Technology trend awareness as a skill refers to being mindful of the technology that is recently becoming popular and is readily accepted in the market or industry. It also encompasses one’s ability to recognize and understand the usefulness of any such technology for the success of his business.

The industry-wide acceptance of a particular technology can be seen either as an opportunity or as a threat to an individual firm. Either way, the technology trend awareness skills serve as the most important asset. Ideal technology trend awareness skills would mean a person’s ability to either correspond to the industry-wide technology adoption or surpass it.

Why is technology trend awareness important

Regardless of which industry we fall under or which department we work under, keeping up with the technology trends is imperative. Following are the areas where technology trend awareness skills play their significant role:

  • Enhancing your visibility to the customers. According to an estimate, more than 2 billion people use their mobile devices for internet access. Technology has been absorbed in everyone’s lives to the extent that every day we all interact with one kind of screen or another, mostly using internet. Therefore, your customers could be anywhere using any kind of technology. Technology trend awareness helps you identify what your customers are mostly spending their time with so that you can connect with them easily. For instance, if it’s their mobile devices they prefer to use, have you pondered over how your website looks in mobile format?
  • Increasing opportunities with new ideas and new ventures. Technology trend awareness doesn’t necessarily help with marketing alone. It increases opportunities to improve other areas as well. ‘Lean manufacturing’ is a good example of improvements through technology trend awareness skills. you can adopt new and trending technologies without necessarily having a technology-centric business, or start a new technology-centric venture, all for the sake of additional revenue opportunities.

How to improve technology trend awareness as a skill

Following are some ways in which you can try and keep yourself updated to improve your technology trend awareness skills:

  • Join technology related forums and read technology related blogs. Forums and blogs that are focused on a particular topic or category are one of the best sources of information. You can read the comments of other users to know their opinions and anticipations about the latest trends. In fact, you can express your own opinions, doubts, and queries as well. You can also subscribe to the newsletters of your favorite technology-oriented websites.
  • Follow people on Twitter or other social media. Find a technophile, or anyone who works with technology and inspires you, on Twitter or any other social media. Since they are always up on the latest trends in technology, reading their posts on a regular basis will help you improve your technology trend awareness.
  • Attend seminars. Reading about things may be useful, but there is nothing like exploring a topic through discussion. You can meet people with the same level of interest and inquisitiveness for technology as yours, share ideas with them, and gain knowledge from their experiences. This is especially helpful if the people you meet or the spokesperson of the seminar belong to a different company, field, or industry.
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