Why Effective Communication Skills are Important for Me

Everyone can communicate, but not everyone can be an effective communicator. We may think that since we have been communicating since the day we learnt how to talk, we should all be masters at communication. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but most people (including myself) are actually bad communicators. We may talk for long hours, but the information may not be successfully delivered to the person on the listening end. We may think that our words are harmless, but put it in a different context, these words are actually offensive. This is why some say that communication is a form of an art, one that is not easily mastered.

Indeed, I agree with that. Poor communication skills will lead to a communication breakdown, where information is not successfully delivered from one person to another. In some cases, poor communication skills can even damage the relationship of one person with another. This is why effective communication skills are important, because we are not living alone on a deserted island. We are living in a highly globalized world, where there are many people of different cultures staying together in one country, or even working within one company. At many times, one needs to build relationship with others and work with them to get things done, and that is not possible without good communication skills.

Imagine working in a team where communication breakdown occurs frequently because instructions send via emails are not clear enough, or no instructions were given because one assumes that the others know what is going on. A task that could have originally been completed within a month would take 2 months to be completed. This will no doubt undermine your superior’s impression of you and your capabilities, which can be avoided had proper communication skills been utilized.   

I took up this module to learn about effective communication skills as I believe that these are skills that cannot be attained overnight but attained through practice. As demonstrated above, poor communication skills do not bode well for one’s future career and that is something that I wish to avoid. I certainly hope that after this module, I would have enough time to practice on these skills and be able to one day confidently call myself to be an effective communicator.