The most important "programming" skill for non-programmers is simply knowing when a programmer could automate some tedious, error-prone task that the non-programmer spends a lot of time doing.

I remember when I worked second-level support. Most of us had no programming ability. I did. A coworker used to spend hours—when he had many other things he should have been doing—on some ridiculous task that a bit of text processing could have automated. When I found that out, I wrote him a script and told him, "Be on the lookout for things like this. Don't ever waste your time with something like this again. Ask someone who knows how to program if there is something that could be done."

I'm guessing there is a lot of that out there.

If I made a list the first skill would be 'Explaining the bug you're seeing without saying "It just doesn't work."'

0. What was your goal?

1. What did you do? (Report the steps exactly.)

2. What did you expect?

3. What happened instead? (Report the messages exactly.)

4. What are your wild speculations about the causes and solutions?

6.0001 [0]

Seriously. One simple intro to CS class will allow a non-programmer to more easily differentiate between what can be done easily and what can't [1].

[0] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu... [1] https://xkcd.com/1425/

1. Knowing when to be lazy

That would be: "First, turn it off and then back on."

Microsoft Excel

Documentation reading comprehension.