It’s important you can present yourself in a confident and professional manner when it comes to interviews, but this also carries over into a work environment.
Once you get a job you need to be able to communicate effectively with your colleagues and with your customers/users. I know you think your silent genius act makes you look special, but it doesn’t. The initial interaction between humans involves building rapport. It’s kind-of difficult to build rapport with someone who refuses to talk to you and can’t look you in the eye. You need to get your communication skills sorted before you try to enter the job market.
If you are working in IT your written skills will be really important. You will need to communicate with colleagues and customers/users in a concise, but accurate way. People won’t read waffle (TL;DR), but they will demand enough detail to make sense of what you are saying. A quick read through your typical IT forum will make you realise that most people have terrible written skills and are incapable of stringing together a logical argument. You don’t have to be a prize winning novelist, but you need to be able to make yourself understood.
Remember in a previous post I wrote about enthusiasm. It doesn’t matter how enthusiastic you are if you can’t express it!
I’ve written some post on writing tips and public speaking tips. I think this is important for you as someone who is trying to enter the job market, or someone who is trying to move up the ladder. Don’t lose out on an opportunity because you’ve neglected your soft skills!
Check out the rest of this series here.
Cheers
Tim…