Why effective communication skills are important for me?

Image by flavijus via Flickr

Easily see that from the blog title, I am a student major in computing and interested in IT areas. More and more I realized that technological works are not just setting in front of the computer and doing programming, but also need to communicate with people either from your geek teammates or business field, because you have to share your ideas with others and ask for requirements properly, as well as to communicate with users and finally sell your products.

Communication Skills are different in different environments. From my experience, in a team meeting, the communication skills are more like leading to brainstorming sections, analyzing and commenting on the direction of the group process, clarifying expectations of group members, and also creating consensus within the team. In this process, team leader plays an important role in explaining clearly the plans and organizing their ideas, especially holding the aware of erasing the barriers between teammates and encouraging them generate their viewpoints. It is important for ensure accountability for communication and build the self-responsibility in the beginning of work, making every member in the meeting know clearly the goals they should achieve and pay full attention during the whole work. The failure may usually occur when staffs do not get the viewpoint clearly and thus, may get confusing to the whole framework of the project and begin works without goal-orientation and more unfortunately, they don’t submit future inquiry on it. Take software engineering as a example, teammates start work with deeply understanding of the framework and connection between user interface, logic and storage, leading to huge difficulties in subsystems merging and testing as a whole because each teammates are doing very different part of the project.