Punctual is not a skill

A young woman in Cairo is finishing her CV. Under skills she has written what she was taught to write: hard-working, punctual, flexible, quick to learn, available immediately.

For a long time those were the right words. Factories, offices and shops needed people who lived close by, cost little and would do as they were asked. A CV proved you met that standard, and the employer's task was to find enough such people at the lowest wage that would bring them in.

That world has not vanished, but it is shrinking, and it is rarely where people hope to end up. When the work happens on a screen, living close by counts for nothing. Someone in another city, or another country, is just as available and often cheaper. A machine is more punctual than all of them.

So her list, honest as it is, says only this: put me anywhere. And whoever can be put anywhere is the easiest person in the world to replace.

What is still scarce is someone who is plainly better. It might be a craft, writing or analysis or design that people in the field recognise as excellent. It might be the harder human things: patience with an angry customer, judgement when nobody is sure, the warmth that makes a difficult week easier for everyone around her. Some people call those soft. They are the hardest to find.

She does not need to be exceptional at everything, or for every employer in Cairo. She needs to be clearly excellent at something that one particular kind of team badly needs, and to be able to show it.

That is a different CV, and a different few years before she writes it.