The Ability to Develop and Articulate Your Ideas is Workplace Currency

Episode Transcript

Sari: The Skill: Being able to develop and articulate your ideas is a skill that will serve you in every aspect of your life. From relationships to careers, this is one of the most important skills to focus on.

Sari: Got Skills? Of course, you do! But can you talk about the skills you have and how you use them?Whether it’s with your cousin, your potential new boss, or the mentor who has 20+ years in your dream role, skills talk is hard, but it doesn’t have to be.

Michelle: As a spinoff to the Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby Podcast, each week on Got Skills the Skills Baby team is taking a deep dive into a key takeaway from an episode of the podcast, focused on actionable ways for professionals to Skill Up.

Sari: I’m your host, Sari Weinerman and with me is Michelle Smith. We’re here to help you breeze through the next family reunion, interview, or mentorship opportunity by better understanding the skills you have and how to talk about them!

Michelle: This week, we’re diving into Season 1 Episode 3 of Let’s Talk About Skills Baby. In this episode Kelly speaks with Elizabeth Leiba, Director of Instructional Design and Innovation at City College in Florida, and Cohost of The EdUp Experience Podcast. They discuss the types of skills Elizabeth feels students should work on strengthening most during their higher education experience, and how the practical application of these skills in the workplace often looks very different from their application in academia … but that doesn’t make them irrelevant.

Sari: This idea of skills being applied differently in different places is something I really want to dive into. Most often, when we assess our skillsets, we make the mistake of actually assessing our applied experience, rather than our skills. For instance, it may be hard for a person with tons of experience serving in a restaurant, to recognize that they actually have great sales skills. When it comes down to it, helping a patron navigate the menu, decide what to order, and ultimately enjoy their food, is a full circle sales experience. The client was nurtured, accommodated and catered to, just like a sales rep would do with a perspective customer. However, when the server goes to explain their skills, they often talk about the restaurant’s register system, or seating software, their ability to carry several plates on one arm, and their endurance to stand on their feet all night. While these are valuable experiences they gained on the job, they don’t actually assess the skills they honed while serving.

Michelle: Definitely. It’s thinking like this helps us to open doors for ourselves, and our future employers, when they don’t always seem obvious. We have to learn how to look beyond the tasks we complete, to see the lessons they taught us, and the strengths they helped us develop. This exact sentiment is true of education experiences as well. It can be hard to recognize how homework assignments translate to workplace job duties when the experience of doing them is so different, but actually the skills needed to do them might be exactly the same. Like, remember that Powerpoint presentation you had to make in your 10^th grade history class, or even your middle school report where you dressed up as Abraham Lincoln? You can bet that skill was directly applied to the last proposal or presentation you had to make at work!

Sari: Exactly! While the subject matter may be wildly different, the skills to organize the data you are presenting, create a compelling story for the people you are presenting too, and deliver the information with clear and emphatic speech, are all the same!

Michelle: Absolutely! Elizabeth speaks on this sentiment in the way she describes her lesson plans as an English professor. She has distilled those lessons down to two very specific skills that she wants her students to develop, and builds her assignments to target them.

Elizabeth: I think the biggest thing in terms of the skill sets that I feel are important is student’s ability to articulate their ideas.

I think writing and speaking, and being able to develop an idea and support that idea and help others understand your ideas, is how, that’s really the currency in the workplace. If someone was not able to articulate what they’re talking about, make sure people, whether it’s your employees, whether it’s your clients, whether it’s your boss, you want people to understand what you’re trying to communicate, make sure that there is support and evidence for what it is that you’re trying to, whether it’s the claim that you’re making, whether it’s initiative, whether you’re trying to sell somebody something.

Sari: Developing your ideas, and communicating them to others. Wow, when you really think about it, this is precisely what writing is all about. This is why you suffered through those 10 page papers and constant essays in your English classes. The subjects you were writing about were always secondary to the main goal of honing the skills of idea development and articulation.

Michelle: Thank you Elizabeth for helping me to reconcile my 30-page undergraduate capstone assignment on measuring corporate social responsibility. The content was something I was (and am) passionate about, but the sheer amount of time it took to compile seemed … unnecessary. As I’ve grown in my career, I actually realized one of my strengths is documenting my ideas and explaining them to others.  While I haven’t written 30 pages to support my ideas since I left the university, I am so thankful I was encouraged to hone those skills before graduation.

Sari: Girl, me too! I think if we all stopped to think about it, we’d realize we use those skills every single day, and not just professionally, but personally too. Being able to explain your thoughts clearly and succinctly is essential for every relationship, from the one with your coworkers, to your partner, to your manager, and even your toddler!

Michelle: I couldn’t agree more, and I love the way Elizabeth puts this into perspective through her teaching model. She says;

Elizabeth: And I think that’s something we need to really impart to students that even though you have to be proficient in your field, typically being able to articulate your ideas, be able to get buy-in from people, and be able to just be an influence. Be a team player. All these different soft skills that a lot of times we call them soft skills, but really at the end of the day, that’s what gets you hired. That’s what gets you promoted. That’s what gets people to like you. The end goal is to help that student get skills that for me, as a writer, a writing teacher composition, can I teach you how to write emails and do a proposal for your boss so that you won’t look silly?

That’s really the end of the day, not about APA and punctuation cause we spell check for that.

It’s more about the student. What’s going to be best for the student and make sure the student comes out of that experience having grown and learn and being more proficient for their academic life and their personal life.

Michelle: Wow, I love Elizabeth. Can I sign up for her class? It really is so simple when you look at it this way. Durable skills, are the ones we need to focus on. You’ll never come across a job that doesn’t require you to articulate your ideas, get buy-in from other people, or be a team player. It’s something that we sometimes can forget in the doldrums of our daily workload – this sounds like the moments we feel disgruntled, frustrated, and like we’re the ‘only people doing the work.’ When we pause to see that forest through the trees, we can actually use these moments to lean into our durable skill set and be that team member and leader we want to see in others and maybe make the day just a little bit more fulfilling for ourselves.

Sari: Right! There are so many benefits to digging deep to hone our durable skills not just when things are going smoothly, but also when the going gets tough.

You know what the next step is right? After we hone our durable skills, what’s even more important is being able to talk about them. 

Michelle: Absolutely. You can have such fabulous strengths across many skills, but if you don’t know how to showcase that to others, its not going to give you that interview or career or confidence boost youre looking for, and thats precisely why we started Got Skills! To help each and every one of our listeners connect these dots and figure out how their past experiences from education, work, and personal life alike, are the building blocks of the exact skills that make them most desirable and successful.

Sari: Thanks for joining us on this episode of Got Skills. The podcast where we explore how to understand the skills you’ve got, and more importantly, how to talk about them. Got Skills is a Growth Network Podcasts production. “To learn more about the hosts of Got Skills head to skillsbaby.com/gotskills. Find out what we’re up to, the latest news in the skills world, and what events are coming up that you should keep an eye on! Last but not least, make sure to follow Growth Network Podcasts on LinkedIn for more awesome shows to add to your podcast feed. We’ll see you next time on Got Skills.”