Topic:
Tell me about where you are at the start of this course with regards to the ‘non-technical’ skills needed for an IT professional. For example: how would you rate your writing skills, your speaking skills, your ability to organize? Are you comfortable with speaking in front of a crowd, working with a group of strangers?
Communication is a ‘non-technical’ skill that is extremely important asset for any IT professional to have. In fact, communication is essential for any job field as it helps people to be successful in what they do. Communication is the ability to communicate your ideas and information to others. Communication skills can be broken down to several parts such as oral communication, written, and non-verbal communication. Each type of communication has their own benefits and downside. The reason for communication being essential is due to the fact that in any workplace, you are expected to work with people and address any ideas and problems in an organized fashion. Without it, your tasks become very difficult and produces poor productivity.
In terms of my ability to communicate with others, it is in such a poor state and is very lacking. I have very terrible oral communication skills since I am naturally a person who dislikes to discuss with people I do not know and socialize with people. This has been a persistent problem throughout my childhood which has staggered my ability to communicate my ideas and knowledge with others and lowered my confidence level. Oral communication is an effective form of communication since there are more flexibility in how you relay your message and fast you can relay it. Oral communication is very interactive in that you are able to respond to people faster and answer any confusion that may occur. In my personal experience working at a telecommunication company as a student assistance, communication was very important to my productivity. I learned that communication was important in a hard way. To illustrate, at Ericsson I rarely saw my supervisor at work since he was always on business trips. Fortunately, my supervisor would often try to establish communication by calling me on what I should be doing and addressed any problems that needed to be done. However, whenever I tried to communicate with him orally, it always ended up terribly since I was unable to convey my ideas and information on what I was doing, why these problems exist and possible solutions. This resulted terribly bad since my supervisor being very confused due to my inability to effectively construct an orderly and well thought message to relay back to him.
Unlike my oral communication, my written communication seems to be way stronger since I am able to have more time to organize my thoughts to provide a clearer and detailed message to people. Written communications allows not only more time to think, it also allows you to edit your message and potentially correct any possible mistakes. Although my writing skills are not very great in that I am not very concise and my vocabulary and grammar are limited, I would generally assume that my writing skills is somewhat acceptable in most workplaces since I do not feel like I lack the ability to convey my opinions and ideas to the other party. To illustrate, I have noted that my oral communication with my supervisor has always resulted very poorly. However, my supervisor soon found out my writing skill was much more understandable and fairly good to my supervisor standards that we soon changed our form of communication to just emailing each other. This has led both parties (my supervisor and I) to be much more productive since we are able to accomplish more tasks much faster and effectively. I was able to convey information to my supervisor much more clearer and detailed on why these problems occur and possible solutions to either mitigate the problem or solve them. This has led me to be much more successful at my work since I was able to communicate in some form with my coworkers and with my supervisor.
To conclude, communication skill should never be neglected in any work field as it will cause complications and low productivity with your team and coworkers. I hope that my communication course will help me polish my ‘non-technical’ skills and learn how to effectively communicate with others in a more concise and orderly fashion way.