Guest Blogger
You may be the best and fastest 'Code-Slinger' in the West, literally, but all that don't mean Jack if you don't have LEADERSHIP and PEOPLE skills, according to a report by TechRepublic.
For anyone working in technology with dreams of becoming senior management, you might be surprised to find that while your hard technical skills will get you so far, it will be your softer skills that will take you the rest of the way.The article at TechRepublic brings to mind Great Personalities like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, and John Lennon, who all had only very elementary education but can still overcome great odds to reach the pinnacles of their illustrious careers.
By soft skills, I mean those skills that are part of day to day life as a senior manager: Writing a clear and concise memorandum, listening, communicating, public speaking, running a meeting, conducting interviews, and managing people and resources to accomplish objectives.
We all have great respect for those individuals and hope to one day follow in their footsteps. But I'm afraid times have become even more complicated since then.
A person with average IT skills but has the EQ to manage people and resources is more likely than his/her highly skilled but poorly adjusted IT counterparts to be promoted to senior positions. Already, we are witnessing the New Working Class being made up of highly intelligent, highly educated IT workers who do not have their managers' Charisma, Communication skills, and Leadership Skills. To move ahead, one must not only be diligent, but also have the wits to practice those skill sets.
As if working in this 'Outsourconomy' isn't hard enough, now that the average IT worker has to cultivate other non-IT skills just to be able to compete. If all this sounds a little too Machiavellian, that's because it is. Business is a cold-hearted Mistress.
Someone once asked me, "What do you bloggers know about the trials and tribulations of those who work in the real world and have two mortgages to pay?" You bloggers who wake up at ten, surf the Internet for 2 hours while watching CNN on TV and eating pop-tarts/Cheerios in your pajamas. My quiet response was, "I wish that were true."
Some of us became full-time bloggers because we have been ousted from the IT world. And I think there are no less than several hundred thousands of us in the U.S. Maybe even more worldwide.
I hope it is abundantly obvious to my readers that the 'take-away' from the TechRepublic report is, no matter what our pursuit in live is, the human interaction is very important. Even for a hermit blogger.
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