#GOOGLECLOUDJOURNEY: Six Fascinating Wishes for Choosing Employers
Part 6 – Professional skills in the organization
NOTE: If you wandered into this blog series for the first time, I recommend first reading my first post that elaborates on the whole series here
In addition to maintaining and growing your own professional skills, which I wrote in the previous post, it is great to be surrounded by competent people. In this way, competence and professionalism develop together which benefits all parties involved. It is said that a group is more than the sum of its members. This saying can also be applied in the IT sector.
In my analysis of the characteristics important of an employer, professionalism in the organization turned out to be a separate category which was the fourth most important of the six categories. It includes the skills of the team, the skills of the supervisor, and the skill of listening to the personnel.
Teamwork and social skills
Team competence can be understood in at least two different ways. Someone might make a difference between soft and hard skills, I make a difference between different skills because “soft” skills are skills just like any other. Taking others into consideration and interaction skills is sometimes hard work, and when successful, the team members create the psychological safety I mentioned earlier, which again plays a key role in the success of an expert organization. Mindfulness of others is thus an important success factor in an organization.
Technical know-how all around
Technical professionals are also interested in the know-how of others. The environment for working is enjoyable when those around you know something that you don’t know yourself. This does not require a machine from which gurus of the same topic one after another rush into the yard, but people from different backgrounds. A junior coder can just as well have new and interesting tricks to teach a senior since they look at the field with completely fresh eyes. Here too, to the point of the reader getting bored, I bring up the importance of a safe atmosphere and a sense of security, so that thoughts and things can really be shared.
Foreperson and the skill of listening
Listening – or at least pretending to – is easy. Listening and truly internalizing the thought turns out to be difficult time after time. It is thus in itself a demonstration of skill to know how to listen to people and take actions based on that. An important skill, especially for a supervisor. One theme in the organization’s professional skills category is the competence of the supervisor, while another was the consultation of the personnel.
Even at a more abstract organizational level, consulting the personnel for important topics is a skill. This is the point when I stumble into my own words because my categories listed in the opening post regarding competence, empathy and community, and processes get mixed up when thinking about the topic. As a criticism of my own “research” work, I could already say at this stage that the categorization I have formed should not be taken as the final truth. Fortunately, finding the final truth is secondary in these writings after awakening thoughts!
Summary
There are many kinds of professional skills, and a unique cluster of them creates the skills for success. Others type out beautiful code at lightning speed, while others know how to tell the customer and other important parties how beautiful that code really is and how useful it is for you. Others, on the other hand, know how to understand different points of view, are skilled at the ways of respectful interaction and thus keep the whole group together. We should continue to take into account how important different backgrounds and skills are for the organization.
About the author:
Perttu Pakkanen is the Talent Acquisition Lead at Codento. Perttu is eager in making sure that people joining Codento will fit with the values of Codento and enjoy the ride with us. Perttu’s passion is to understand what drives people in their career decisions.
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