Importance of Effective Communication Skills

I would like to highlight the need to keep a check on the communication skills, even if your job doesn’t directly need you to. Effective communication can be through verbal speech or other methods of relaying information that gets a point across to other user. It’s a two way street so you also need to be able to understand exactly what the other user is conveying back to you from their words as well as body language. Effective Communication enables organization resources being used efficiently.

Just as in other industries, financial industry expects you to be able to negotiate, sell and give effective reasoning for your point. And for that, you need to be excellent at your communication skills. Here’s why:

  1. Effective communication does not mean that you have to be fluent
    It just means that you should be able to speak and reply in the used medium (which is English for most of the part of world). You should at least know the correct usage of words, tenses and grammar, to be able to explain your understanding effectively and efficiently!
  2. Communication being a basic prerequisite, it’s awkward to not know how to communicate!
    It looks really awkward and displeasing, when a person with high qualifications is lousy at communication in their professional life. Being a basic prerequisite for any desk job, effective communication skills makes working with you a hundred times faster. How will you understand a problem to solve it, if you cannot effectively communicate with your team?
  3. Financial industry requires you to use financial terms in the right places. This is only possible if you are good at communicating the analysis you have done. 
    The jargon words were created, not to make your life hell, but because no other words in simple English could describe them. This is because 95% of time that you spend on your job as an analyst, investment banker or in any decision making position, you are not communicating with the masses. You are discussing the issues with other professionals! And for that, you should be able to speak the right way or precisely the effective way.
  4. Nobody wants to read a poorly written research report.
    If you are in the financial industry, drawing up reports is a major part of your job. More importantly, these reports are not made for fun. They are made to understand a circumstance better. You are supposed to make it easier for the reader to understand the situation from your report than from primary data. The need of a strong grip on language becomes crucial when you work as an analyst who has to write research reports.
  5. You cannot Lack in communicating effectively in the primary language used in your immediate financial environment as you will need it at some point in your career.
    I am going to emphasize here on the English language, because this is the language you studied your qualification in, and this is the language in which you will read and write reports. This is the language in which the relevant details are found within your industry and this is the language in which financial terms are used. Isn’t it then silly then to not brush up your communication skills in the same language?

My argument here is that you have to strive to be a perfect package for your clients and employer and if you lack effective communication skills, you need to work on them. If you have been working on your qualifications and financial skills and you lack the grip on language, you should give it due time and improve it, to be able to deliver your point of view effectively.

How to Improve
I think that every little effort matters. There are the good old techniques our grandfathers used, which were reading newspapers, magazines and books. Conventional techniques to improve are watching movies and TV series, reading novels as well as using relevant words in your daily language. Self criticizing activities such as when you don’t structure sentences and talk in broken language, but now you consciously structure a sentence in mind, can enrich your language and communication skills. Effective Communication Skills are key part of your personality and can be the step from a stagnant career to a much deserved promotion.


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