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You said WHAT?!


I have decided that the cause of aggravation, stress, burn out, and all the other maladies that seem to come with living another day is that the problem with people is other people. The reason that people cause each other grief is that the most important thing they need to do is not done well, clear, and concise. People cannot communicate.
If you are a living creature, you communicate. I have seen enough nature documentaries to know that communication is not only essential to humans, but to all the creatures- big and small. Why do people seem to screw it up so much?  Much like a contagious illness, poor communication is easily spread to the people we love at home and the people we love, hate, and everything in between at work. Since, this is a blog and not a 10,000 page book, I am going to limit my comments on communication to the world of workforce development.

In workforce development, we need to think about how our poor communication affects us as professionals and our customers.  As professionals, we receive communication from other professionals that work in different capacity, and from our customer base.  Recently I had an experience where one workforce development professional (person#1) made a statement to me about a particular project and then another workforce development professional (person #2) made a statement to me about that same project that was contradictory. This was extremely frustrating as I was unsure where this left me.  Now let’s analyze the impact that has on a person. Imagine that scenario if the person #1 and person #2 were management in an organization and the outcome of the project directly affected my job performance. Take this same scenario and imagine if person #1 and person #2 was an auditor or a policy maker. Again, the outcome can be poor job performance.  Can you see the frustration that this would cause? Ultimately poor communication can not only lead to frustration, but failure.
It is important that all people that need to deliver a message, do so clearly and concisely. This requires that communication is strategic and that the all the people responsible for delivering the message communicate with each other.

On the other end, as workforce development professionals, we receive communication from our customers. Not every person has the ability to communicate their wants and needs. Some people are able to clearly articulate their needs. Others cannot do this and instead may exhibit bad communication: rambling, yelling and screaming, or the ultimate bad communication- lack of communication. This is not only true when job seekers seek to utilize workforce development services, but when they try to get a job. Communication is a skill highly sought out by employers when hiring. If someone cannot articulate their message in a job interview, their chances of getting hired are slim. 
As workforce development professionals, it is our job to help our customers learn to articulate their message, whether it be needs and wants, or reasons they should be hired. Ultimately the way we do this is by clearly communicating to our customers and modeling good communicative behavior amongst our peers.

Communication is not a subject with a start and a finish. I could go on all day. Good communication is on-going between people. The key is to keep it going. As a workforce development professional, ensure that you are communicating in the clearest manner possible with your colleagues and your job seeking customers. If you have job seeking customers that have difficulty communicating, help them learn to be effective communicators. Let’s challenge each other to continue to evolve our communication to be more effective workforce development professionals and everyday people!

I welcome any communication you may have on this topic. Feel free to leave a comment below or send me an email at kcirincione@gmail.com ~ Karen Cirincione

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