Five Keys to Acquiring Better Verbal Communication Skills

Good verbal communication skills, the ability to communicate your thoughts effectively, is one of the most important skills you must master to get a good job and advance within your chosen field.

Everything starts with your ability to be able to effectively express or present ideas, opinions, objections, emotions, directions, dissatisfaction and pleasure. While its importance is critical to success in business, it is very often the skill we most take for granted or assume we have, since we've been communicating with people and getting what we need or want, more or less, all of our lives. Also, the people you interact with most often are probably close to your age and communicate the same way you do.

O.K., so…like…, what's the problem?

A potential problem is that business communication can be different than social discourse. For one thing, you will be interacting with a wider variety of individuals with different educational backgrounds, ages and experience levels. And each, especially your future corporate recruiter or supervisor will have expectations about your job performance based upon your ability to express yourself effectively. A study of unnecessary reasons for job interview failure, by a large big ten university, listed poor expression, diction or grammar as one of the major reasons for rejection in job interviews.

The good news is that it will be relatively easy for you to learn to communicate effectively in a business environment. Below are five suggestions for improving your verbal communication skills to prepare for those all important job interviews and your first job.

1. Get one or more internships while you're in college. Apart from the learning experience, you'll be in a business environment where you can listen to how individuals present ideas to clients, argue points of difference with associates and generally conduct themselves with their counterparts. You'll also be forced to communicate in an organized and more formal fashion.
   
   
2. Don't be afraid to express your ideas in your classes. Use the interaction with your instructor to sharpen your ability to think on your felt, use proper grammar and make points of view. Overcoming a fear of talking in class is a great way to practice, with instructors who take your points of view seriously.
   
   
3. Get a part-time sales job, even if it's only over the holidays. It will help you gain confidence in expressing yourself and reduce possible shyness you might have among strangers.
   
   
4. Practice talking with relatives or family friends who are older than you, about a subject that requires you to express ideas or emotion and talk in extended sentences. In an interview situation, when you are applying for a job, this ability to express your feelings and experiences in an enthusiastic manner is a critical skill that will separate you from the pack.
   
   
5. In discussions with friends, parents and in class, practice using facts to buttress a point of view rather than just your opinion. One way to practice this is to read the paper for a week or two about a particular subject, whether it's a political race or another news story, so that you're able to express an opinion and support it with facts. The substitution of facts for opinions in conversation is particularly important to the acceptance of a new employee as a contributor in a business meeting.

You've studied hard and taken a variety of courses to prepare yourself for a career after college. Don't neglect your acquisition of one of the most important skills which could make you stand out from the crowd: the ability to effectively communicate your thoughts.

-- David E. Gordon is the Director of Advertising and Promotion Internships in the Marketing Communications Department at Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois.