Regardless of your field or responsibilities, developing executive-level skills increases your organizational value and optimizes advancement. Here are the five most important skills:

1) Business acumen. Whether we work in marketing, sales, cloud architecture or any other field, our job is usually tied to a business goal—optimizing business performance.

Business acumen skills include the ability to read a financial statement or balance sheet; calculate a return-on-investment model based upon the expected value of an opportunity; knowledge of what the CEO, chief financial officer, chief information officer and chief technology officer care about and making your communication with them relevant. These skills are critical in any career and will position you for advancement.

2) Leadership. Your leadership skills will determine the size of your team. For example, if you can influence one person then you have a team of two people. If you can influence 10 people, you can have an 11-person team. If you can influence 1,000 people, you can have 1,001 people on your team.

Strong leadership skills help bring out the best in others, help your team perform well and enable you to deliver great results to your customers.

3) Sales. To understand the value of sales skills, you must understand that we are always selling. If you want to get a promotion, you have to sell your manager on giving you the promotion. If you want to get people to work with you on a project, you need to sell them the value of the project. Whether your career is in technology, marketing or any other career, sales is a critical executive skill that will make you better at your job.

4) Emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the best predictor of someone's long-term success. On average, employing emotional intelligence skills can result in about a $30,000 increase in the average person's salary, according to Talent Smart EQ.

Emotionally intelligent people make great leaders. In general, they are empathetic, they raise the energy in the room and bring out the best in others. Emotional intelligence is required for difficult conversations and is the best predictor of career success.

5) Communication. Communication is critical for optimizing your career. Miscommunication causes most conflicts and problems in the workplace. The better we can communicate our wants and needs, as well as solutions and products, the more likely we are to lead a team or influence someone to make the decision that we want. By improving communication skills, we're better leaders and more valuable employees regardless of position or field.

Michael Gibbs is the CEO of Go Cloud Careers, a global organization that provides training for elite cloud computing careers. Go Cloud Careers helps individuals achieve their dream technology career by getting hired. Gibbs has 25 years of experience in networking, cloud computing and IT security.