Soft Skills for Geeks: Communication 2.0

This project is funded in whole or part with funds from Employer Workforce Training Funds administered by the Oregon Department of Community Colleges and Workforce Development and Worksystems, Inc.

Overview

Now, more than ever, it is critical for technology professionals to communicate well and nurture work relationships. The days of operating in separate departments with the same colleagues for years arelong gone. Now different teams are assembled and reassembled on an almost daily basis, depending on organizational needs.

That means everyone needs to speak the same language and share the same goals. So you techies, need to realize that you’ve got to tailor that water cooler discussion about Open Source database adoption to ensure your non-techie colleague’s eyes don’t glaze over. And you, non-techie person, need to be interested in and acknowledge ways that technology has improved your organizational efficiency and work capabilities.

In this fun and provocative session, you will learn to better harness your intellectual strengths when asked to join forces with different personalities, varying capabilities and a myriad of work habits and opinions. Learn to better analyze people and assessinteractions and relationships. Enhance your ability to collaborate and make your projects successful. Learn to take a complete wholistic approach to teamwork.

Develop interpersonal best-practices that:

• build on your existing knowledge and experience
• help you get what you need/want, while balancing it with the needs/wants of others
• maintain positive relationships with others, even when there are differences or conflict
• demonstrate successful repetition of interpersonal skills and build confidence
• are simple enough to be doable, while complex enough to be effective

Prerequisites

You should have basic analytical abilities, the capacity to self-reflect and a willingness to explore new ideas and practice vital skills.

Intended Audience

Technology professionals of all levels

Course Outline

Why You Need This Course:
Do you get frustrated by how much time it takes to deal with people at work? Do you wish that sometimes these people would just go away and let you do your job? Often technology professionals are praised for their abilities to troubleshoot, understand complex problems, and have the patience to figure out how to make technology work for the rest of us. This does not leave a lot of time to focus on how to best relate to people.

This course will assist you in quickly understanding team and interpersonal dynamics from a technology point of view. You will learn and practice valuable skills that link interpersonal dynamics to concepts you already know – a scientifically-proven, effective way for you to learn. This course first provides the conceptual tools. You will then be guided to custom build your own practice of these tools, and coached on how to apply them to your work environment and relationships. The skills you learn will be useful to you in every facet of life, whether at work or in your personal daily activities.

Training Objectives: What You Will Learn

• Apply systems thinking to better understand your own part in the success of collaborative interactions and work relationships
• Understand the concepts of emotional and social intelligence in order to recognize and practice attributes of human behavior that lend themselves toward these
• Distinguish between effective and ineffective communication strategies
• Leverage the most essential, but least used collaboration strategy to build trust and make crucial conversations easier
• Build a platform for assessing and upgrading your capacity for change
• Apply new insights, knowledge and skills to existing projects and/or work relationships for greater learning results