Developing effective communication skills is important to me as it has often been touted by lecturers and seniors alike that this is an area we cannot afford to neglect. In the start-of-the-year department talk held by our chemical engineering department, our professor told us that NUS chemical engineering graduates are frequently lauded for their high technical achievement but criticised for their lack of interpersonal skills and knowledge beyond engineering.
People skills were also emphasised by my senior who went on an Industrial Attachment. As the chief editor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering Students' Society (ChESS), I had the privilege to approach interns to ask them for write-ups to appear in our CCA's annual Columns Magazine, as a way to let juniors learn about the industry from their seniors.
Quoting my senior, he said "I have learnt that even as an intern with limited technical knowledge, it is usually the soft skills that play the crucial role for this position. My attention to detail, situational awareness, PR and communication skills and judgment were constantly put to the test... Communication isn’t just about spoken words, rather, it is the transfer of meaning that is important."
Such wise words indeed! He even included advice and tips on how to do a successful internship, for example how to get along with colleagues and superiors, the dress code for an intern to impress etc.
As we all know, communication is important because it enables us to make friends, live in harmony with our families and work smoothly in the workplace. Communication is not just about language power and knowing the correct manners and tone when you speak, it is also about sincerity and patience to listen, while putting yourself in the shoes of others.
Communication appears to be simple but it is easy to fall into the trap of neglecting it. Misunderstandings and conflicts arise which destroys harmonious relationships and efficiency at work.
In conclusion the importance of communication cannot be understated.
3 comments:
Wow that's quite a detailed account of the Friendship Day Sale incident. It illustrated clearly the problems of poor communication and coordination especially among the various departmental heads.
From my personal experience, one of the biggest enemies of effective communication is procrastination. It is the delay to inform and coordinate that causes tasks and events to be compromised. Sometimes all it takes is to sit everyone down to talk through the task allocation, the expectation and the various deadlines. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that it requires a lot of effort and most of the time the easier thing is to wait until someone else does something.
Dear Yun Nian, I appreciate the effort and time spent to use anecdotes to bring across the importance of effective communication skills. I'm afraid you got carried away with narrating the details, especially of the Friendship Day sale incident. Instead of 250 - 300 words, your blog was 1043-word long! Do bear in mind that one of the 7Cs of writing is conciseness so please stick to the word requirement the next time.
Sorry about that Ms Kim! I have edited my post and omitted the Friendship Day story.
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