Why Communication Skills are the Most Important Skills in a Tech Career

How important are communication skills to those who are seeking a career in technology? Speaking from more than two decades of experience in training technology professionals and assisting them in getting hired, I can tell you that nothing is more important. Not programming; not SysOps; not DevOps. Nothing.

Your level of communication skills will determine whether you get hired or not. Once you are hired, those skills will affect your ability to design and implement technology solutions. When it comes to compensation, good communication skills are the key to achieving a six-figure salary. Overall, they play a critical role in your ability to be successful in a tech career. 

Allow me to illustrate the importance of communication skills by showing how they relate to cloud architect careers, which is my area of expertise.

Communicating with your clients

First and foremost, without unbelievably good communication skills, it will be impossible to design the right architecture for your clients. The cloud architect is the one responsible for meeting with the client and determining the customer’s requirements. During these meetings, you must come to understand the current state of the customer’s business and their plans for the future. You must understand their current technology, including what is working, what is not working, and their future tech goals.

Good communication skills allow you to get the information that you need to know what their tech is like, what their business is like, their goals, and their pain points. Without that information, you will not have what you need to design an architecture. Your ability to ask the right questions, listen, and ensure that we get the answers you need determines your ability to succeed at your job.

It would be great if the client would hand you a paper with all the necessary specifications and say, “Build this.” Do not expect that. You determine the requirements for a system by meeting with the client and applying excellent communication skills.

You may have heard the saying, “Garbage in, garbage out.” It is often used to explain that the output will only be as good as the input. The same concept applies when it comes to designing architecture. The better you understand your requirements, the better your design can be.

Communicating with your team

You cannot know half of all of the technology that is presently out there. Even if you could, there is no feasible way you could be an expert at all of it. To do well in technology, you must be able to collaborate. Technology is a team sport.

In my career, I have spent 10,000 hours on BGP alone. I also spent another 10,000 hours focused on IP multicast. In essence, I have spent 10 years of my career — full time — on just two routing protocols. That time made me an expert, but only in a small subset of the huge world of networking. To do my job well, I need to rely on a lot of other experts.

When the requirements that you have gathered from your client include security components, you need to talk to a security expert. When they include database components, you need to talk to the database expert. When there are network components, you need to talk to the cloud network expert.

Good communication skills are again the key in determining the quality of information that you will receive from these experts. Just like with your client, you will need to ask the experts on your team the right questions, then listen well to their answers. If you do not have the communication skills to do that, it will not matter how much expertise you have available to you. The expertise will remain untapped.

Communicating the design

Once you have gathered the requirements for the design and talked with the experts about it, you need to document the design so that you can present it to the client. At this point, written communication and presentation skills become critical. 

Armed with a document that effectively communicates your architecture, you will return to the client and present them with the design. In some cases, they will have issues with the design, which means you need to go back to your experts and keep communicating with them until you produce a design that the client likes. At that point, you need to persuade the customer to adopt it. Turning again to your communication skills, you effectively map out a plan for implementation and make the sale. 

As you can see, communication skills were essential throughout this entire process. Whatever your area of expertise, having the right tech skills will be important, but not nearly as important as communication skills. Do not neglect them. Without them, you cannot be successful.