Session 1: Communication Impacts on Career Video Transcript

[Rose Proctor] Effective communication is an employability skill that every employer is looking for. But how effectively communicate? Today we're going to be talking about using critical thinking and ethical decision making as well as paying attention to our personal brand in order to increase your ability to effectively communicate. So what does having the ability to effectively communicate really mean, and how will that ability impact your career? Vital communication skills in my opinion, are just as important as any other skill that you may have in any sort of employment. I believe that once you get to a certain point in your career, everybody kind of has the same hard skills.

They know what to do with their job. They have the skills necessary to complete the job, but they are asked to do. But when where many people lack is the ability to communicate with their employers, with their coworkers, or even with their customers. Effectively, that is. They sometimes get too caught up with the business side of it and they don't try to have personal relationships with people and be the human side that is. In my opinion, even in more important in any business than than the business because without knowing your customers and without getting a relationship with them and forming true relationships or true communication with them, you will never succeed because they will not want to come back to you. So that starts with being able to communicate your thoughts clearly, effectively and it can start as soon as you as you have communications or have conversations with people. You can kind of ask them what they think, how they think, what they think and. You have to be kind of get out of your comfort zone. Just ask questions, but especially when you may not understand something or you have never heard of something before, just ask them what that means. A lot of times people will never have a problem. Asking or letting it known, kind of let you know what they think and people like talking about what they know and what they think, so it will never be an issue and letting them know or letting you know how to what it is that they think so just getting their opinions and being able to communicate that through every stage, every step of the way.

So a lot of times I think people when their dialoguing with someone they don't really know how to communicate exactly what they want, and when you're looking at your career goals and like what you want out of your future, you have to be able to portray that to your employers, to your peers correctly and effectively so that they actually know what you want. And you can actually go out and get it, and you can make it clear what you're looking for out of a job, out of an experience, all of that stuff. So a lot of my career is built around different missions that certain units get, and so effective communication is going to be from my boss to me, of what he needs done, and then I will have people that I have to also communicate that to and so that everybody is on the same sheet of music. So effective communication. Bottom line, if there isn't effective communication, there's no way that you can get whatever task is accomplished.

So within the civilian world that would be, I mean the exact same thing of some sort of business venture or some sort of task you have at a corporate company. The ability to effectively communicate is defined as the ability to display appropriate listening, nonverbal, verbal, interpersonal, and written skills. So there is a lot contained in that. Sending a consistent, clear, concise and courteous message that is really easily understood by the receiving party. In all of those different types of communications and then asking questions, clarifying, summarizing, and being able to provide feedback to ensure that your message was effectively received. So as we think about that, let's conduct an exercise together to help us increase our effective communication. Now that we've completed an exercise together and thought a little bit about our ability to effectively communicate, we're going to continue our conversation around effective communication in the next section, including communication types and how our ability to critically think plays such an important and vital role in our effective communication.