Keys to Professional Communication

Are you looking to advance your career? Effective communication is a major key to success.

The top complaint that management has about otherwise very skilled technical employees is that they either can't understand what these technical folks are talking about or the technical just don't have the communication skills necessary to stand them up in front of a meeting for a report of any kind. Whether we are working as a forensic examiner, an expert witness, an IT auditor or any other technical professional, communication is a major key to our success.

Communication is something that most of us do every day, so often we don't feel that we need a lot of training to be able to communicate effectively. The trouble is that our perspective may be affected by who we talk to. If we spend our time communicating with peers, communication will often be easy because we all have the same frame of reference. The problems come in when we start working outside of our peer group. This is especially important if we are aspiring to advance in our organization because as we advance we are moving from one peer group to another. Clearly, we need to be able to communicate in an effective way with both our current peers and our potential future peers!

SANS Institute has just recently begun offering an outstanding short course to try to teach some of these critical communication skills. The course focuses on how to research and write effective whitepapers during the first half and then spends the second half of the course teaching powerful presentation and communication skills. The capstone of the day is a public speaking and presentation workshop where each student has the opportunity to try out the techniques taught in the course.

If you're someone who needs to communicate or give presentations in your professional career, you need to think about checking out this class!