TL; DR
Communication, organization, facilitation, and others are technical skills.
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Setup
I have grown to have a pet peeve. Let me draw an image for you. How many companies succeed to their full capability at everything they do? How many teams have perfect communication with each other, other teams, other departments, and the customer? How often is a workplace perfectly organized such that there are no unnecessary impediments? My pet peeve is when the skills that help in all these things is treated as not being technical.
Hard Skills
These so called “soft skills” are hard. If they were easy, all those questions I asked in the beginning would have different answers. We must acknowledge other skills are important and require focused training and education. The focus on computer, or mechanical skills hurts our ability to be successful.
Skill Diversity
There are a host of skills and knowledge that are needed to ensure that business is successful. Yes, a lot of them involve mechanical, or electric technology. Yet there are other types of technology, technology that examines the way in which we work, communicate, learn, and do business. Let’s start by acknowledging these as technical skills.
Awareness
Acknowledgement will not fix our current situation. That is going to take a long time, with a lot of education and discovery. However, acknowledgement gives credence to those skills. Lacking this acknowledgement makes these skills seam unimportant, superfluous, and trivial. (Yes, I know those are all synonyms.)
Call to Action
Can we please stop excluding these skills from technical skills?