Professional Communimication

Last Tuesday, I attended the MLIS Retreat. While the entire conference was quite enlightening as to the past, present, and future of the program, I was particularly struck by the emphasis on soft skills. There seems to be, for the most part, a noticeable lack of soft skills development within the program, despite the instructors' best efforts to encourage us to develop them through assignments and presentations.

What exactly is a soft-skill you ask? John Fracasso, the Computing Services Manager at FIMS, wrote a paper answering this question and emphasizing the importance of soft skills to librarianship. Here, you can take a test to see if you are "Soft-Skills Savvy" and get a better idea of what exactly these qualities entail. John did an excellent job of citing the gap in evaluation of soft skills: how students acquire them, how these skills are used in the job, and if the program is adequately fostering them within their graduates. After the session, a fellow student informed me that FIMS actually offers a Professional Communication course (LIS-594), which has not been taught in several years. All of these ideas together have been lingering in the back of my mind each time I go to work or enter into a situation where communicating in a professional manner is essential to my success (emails, presentations, and I suppose we could include blogging...).

I have now caught myself, only a few times albeit, saying "yeah," "nope," "no prob," etc. on the job. While I have managed to correct myself with the more appropriate yes, no, not a problem (some variation of the above), I wonder where I learned these skills? I remember my parents correcting my speech when I was younger, but other than that, I cannot remember a time when I was "taught" how to communicate professionally, to my peers, to colleagues, to employers, etc. I do not think that the MLIS program has shown me these skills or taught me them. Yet, the constant emphasis on the professional aspect of the program reminds me that I must keep working on my own soft-skills. There are also things that I know I must improve in order to better communicate in the workplace. For instance, my memo-writing skills could use some work.

With the elimination of 505 as a required course, I would argue that 594 should take its place as a requirement for students entering the program. For those of us who have spent most of our lives in academia, we might be unsure of how to adapt our writing to the professional community. There is a large difference between the beautiful flowing sentences of a wonderfully crafted sentence and the brief, yet informative, communication of an important message and/or idea. Also, conference, networking, and interviewing skills are those unfamiliar to many individuals. In order to succeed, then, in the professional community, we need to critically reflect on the soft skills that we have, those that need improving, and those that we must develop.

For more on professional communication, see Catherine Ross and Patricia Dewdney's monograph entitled Communicating Professionally. I have yet to read it, but it is definitely on my "to buy" list!