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June 29, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Brushing up on your soft skills
The temptation is to scoff at so-called experts who tell you how to get ahead. But if you're looking for career advancement and the higher pay that goes with it, there may be something to the advice by Bennett Ockrim, vice president of Professional Services at Spherion.
Spherion is $2 billion service provider for recruitment in IT, financial services and whatever.
At the core, outsourcing may be the reason why if you're a tech person you may need to brush up on what Ockrim calls your soft skills.
Tech people are becoming a dime a dozen, literally, so you need something more. You need to prove to a potential employer that you can add value to the company beyond your technical qualifications.
Companies are no longer willing to just spend money on a lot of pricey software engineers. As I said they are easy to come by now. Instead, they look at an individual applying for a job and think of him or her as a long-term investment. They want a return on that investment and that goes beyond your technical expertise.
"The enterprise is looking for people who can ascend beyond the technical realm and have an appreciation for the critical business issues of the day," Ockrim advices.
So what are some of the attributes needed by a person who has spent most of his career in IT in order to move farther up the corporate ladder?
Be a good listener and have an appreciation for business in general. You need to understand the top line and bottom line dynamics of the company and also understand the issues around market demand and what satisfies that demand.
Customer retention and how to improve is another key skill that
C-level executives are looking for.
You need the kind of communication skills that will allow you to articulate your thoughts and ideas beyond the bits and bytes of technology.
How do you get some of these skills? Not so easy.
You can go back to school and take business courses, public speaking, business writing, even role playing helps.
When I asked Ockrim if he thought a person could pull off a Liza Doolittle kind of transformation, he said yes. As long as inside that “rough” tech exterior beats the heart and brains of a
white shirt and tie, businessman who is creative and knows how to express himself.
Good luck and may the button-down IBM force be with you.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on June 29, 2006 03:31 PM
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Ok. That's not all. Here are some few more to the list not just to climb the ladder but also to sustain.
In today's IT career one expects to know what I call 'Outsourcing Economics'. The tacts and technics including the glitches in outsourcing.
Communication! Communication! Communication! - Companies sees the throughput they get from you. Can you handle different culture, accent (Indian, Sri lankan or chinese)?
Posted by: Murali at June 30, 2006 09:47 AMWe have developped a concept called MultiCurriculum in which teambuilding softskills are detected and shown on the candidate´s CV through a peer2peer appreciation of individual skills made at the end of a project. The opinions of your colleagues are the best mirror of your market value (communication and collective intelligence skills) within future teams.
Teaming skills are of growing importance to employers. Some of those skills are only detectable at team level. They may vary from team to team.
At the end they are individual skills and the emergence of "teamskills" which can be unique to a particular team
It is easy to talk about those soft skills until you end up on the street. Then the next employer starts with ... we need a manager with technical abilities. Then ask the question - so how many folks am I going to be supervising - answer none, but one day, one day you may be, in the meanwhile I need someone to program, do db work, do workstation and network work etc. And when the load finally gets too high or you get tired of saying, no you can't have a faster computer or no you can't have the latest upgrade, then you are branded as a mean person with no people skills.
So then you say, just put in a req and let accounting turn the person down, except accounting comes to you and you turn it down or they turn it down and said I.T. said no and you are still the bad person. This is the standard first 6 months you are like a god, second 6 months you are ok and last 6 months how could we have hired this guy, he can barely tie his own shoes.
Must reading - "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman. If it does not enlighten and scare an IT person, you should go back to school.....
Posted by: ken at July 5, 2006 11:22 AMSoft skills are to be acquired as one grows up. One can definitely acquire some of these at a later date, in one dose. But the guys who stand out in soft skills are the ones who acquired these skills from school level. One of the most important soft skill is not to lose your cool even in the midst of adversity. Here,Yoga and Meditation are helpful. Try learning Yoga and Meditation at your nearest centre.
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