Development of Oral Communication Skills

Discuss about the Development of Oral Communication Skills.

Introduction

Workforce is the backbone of any business organisation. A skilled set of workers can take a company upward by using their skills. These skills are generally of two categories; existing skills and acquired skills. Existing skills are those with which a person is born and does not need to learn from anybody. And, acquired skills are those which are acquired from any person or institution mainly on the basis of academic requirements or employability requirements. When it comes to recruiting new employees, the HR managers look for a bunch of employability skills. On the other hand the potential candidates try their best to acquire certain skills which they lack and also acquire knowledge regarding certain business tools which are important in modern day business operations. In this reflective journal, my personal assessment regarding two of such subjects is reflected in a brief manner.

Being a public speaker is something we all desire, but few of us have the ability to speak fluently at a public place or in front of a group of unknown person. The reason can be lack of fluency in that particular language or shyness. In my case, both was the reason that I could not speak well in front of anyone, forget speaking at a public place. The shyness which I had was the result of lack of fluency in English while talking. Although I could read and write in English language fairly well. As far as I remember, in my farewell at school I got off the stage with tears in my eyes after standing there for a good eight minutes without uttering a word. So the class on oral communication was much helpful for me.

Oral communication refers to the way of expressing one’s view or ideas or thoughts via the word of mouth. I took the classes from King’s Own Institute (KOI) to develop my oral communication skills using relevant theories and this really helped me a lot to overcome my fear and shyness. With the help of the effective study materials provided by KOI, I learned the language thoroughly. From simplest synonyms – antonyms to lengthy essays, I have been through all to gain deeper understanding regarding the English language. As oral communication is much essential to commence networking and contact building, it is considered as an important skill (Jain, 2017). A person having excellent oral communication skills can excel in any interview session or any other tests.

To successfully pass a HR interview, oral communication skill is the primary requirement of a potential candidate. If a candidate has all the required qualifications for a specific job role, but lacks oral communication skill, then it would be very much difficult for that candidate to pass the interview process (Priya et al. 2017). As for me, I faced this problem while attending interview to join my dream university. But my poor oral communication became a barrier. KOI helped me to make sure that incident never gets repeated. With properly structured course of KOI, learning became easier and my oral communication skills have developed five times more than before. I learned to maintain eye contact with my audience, which I was unable to do previously because of my shyness.

Oral communication is not just an employability skill, it a skill to make one’s personal life better as well (Anewalt and Polack, 2017). And the most important thing which I learned from KOI is, confidence is the key. A person who is confident about own appearance and capabilities, can easily talk to other people or a group of people without a bit of difficulty (Mandeville et al. 2017). With the help of lectures provided in KOI regarding oral communication, anyone can be benefitted, both in personal and professional front. A higher confident level boosts a person’s oral communication skill, just as a developed oral communication skill boosts a person’s confidence level (Young and Travis, 2017). Thus, both complement each other.

Overview of Social media

Social media refers to allowing the participants to create and share their contents and comment their opinion to form social networking (Felix et al. 2017). Every business is concerned about growing their market and gain more customers. Now-a-days, social media is considered as a strong business tool, as it helps the company to grab the attention of millions of people with the help of a single social media post (Hollebeek, 2017). Thus, social media helps companies in identifying potential target customers from a large pool of customers. Social media is an effective business tool, also because new generation of customers are technology freaks and prefer shopping online (Fuchs, 2017). Thus, through online marketing and promotion of their products or services the companies are fetching a large amount of new customers (Cook, 2017). In this digital era, social media helps to spread the news about exciting discounts and newly-opened outlets in the most cost-effective way.

Social media are of several types: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, MySpace etc. All of these are having different types of facilities, using which a company can promote its products or services, cutting it marketing and promotional costs to half. That is why companies are looking for candidates who can efficiently use these social media modes and have a detailed knowledge regarding each of them. I might be from the new generation but I was not aware about the usage of social media that much. I have a Facebook account from which I used only to chat with my friends and an inactive Twitter account which I never used, just signed up to go with the trend. After taking up the classes from KOI, the social media class helped me to learn a lot of other important uses of these social sites.

During the lesson on Social media course, I learned various uses of social media which is effective in drawing more traffic in my account. More the traffic is, more people are watching my post, which means more people will be influenced by my posts. And it will be more effective when I shall be representing my company and its products or services. Blogs can also be used as a crucial business tool because blogs generating more traffic is a great ground to promote products or services to more people. Now-a-days, every successful company is having their own social media accounts in all social media platforms and also having their personal blogs with detailed information about their products (Tuten and Solomon, 2017).

With the help of my knowledge about social media, I am efficient enough to single-handedly influence a wide range of prospective customers. Also, through information available in social media, I would be able to know more about the global market and its current position. Social media helps the organisations to expand their pool of customers and assess their different types of needs through their responds in the company’s social media posts. Social media promptly connects customers to company, initiating a more effective customer care service (Nevin et al. 2017).

How both subjects are beneficial at workplace

The course from KOI has helped me in gaining immense knowledge in the given two subjects – Oral communication and social media. Oral communication course has definitely helped me in cracking the toughest interview, as the HR managers loved my confidence and the way I fluently described myself and answered the questions. With the help of oral communication skills, I am good at public speaking now; this has helped me with the office presentations immensely. Not only that, oral communication skills helped me to overcome my shyness and build contacts in social gatherings as well as office meetings. Oral communication skills took my efficiencies to an upward direction, opening new dimensions of professional opportunities. My reluctance on joining a group discussion has vanished now, giving me enough scope to gather knowledge about different aspects of business world.

Course on social media has helped me to meet my deadline by gaining lots of potential customers for my company. Being in marketing department, the promotion of new products is lied upon me. As I know the use of social media in different ways, I am able to identify prospective customers through different Facebook posts, Instagram posts, Tweets and blog posts. And then, I execute a suitable marketing approach based on that assessment. Knowledge about social media has helped me to grow my network which is very much essential for a marketing professional. Thus, both the subjects have made me organisation-ready by providing me with deeper understanding regarding both the subjects.

Conclusion

Choosing a course which can be beneficial for out career is not an easy job. To enrol myself for the most suitable course, I had to go through an intensive self-assessment program to identify the skills I lack (Cleveland and Reinsvold, 2017). Enrolment is not the answer; one has to concentrate as well to understand the subject properly in order to learn it in a way that that individual gains a thorough idea and gets all the concepts clearly. Acquiring skills and seeing them working in my favour in my professional life is the best thing I have experienced after this entire course. Thus, it is up to us how we choose to spend our valuable time and make our career prospects better.

References

Fuchs, C., 2017. Social media: A critical introduction. Sage.

Cook, N., 2017. Enterprise 2.0: How social software will change the future of work. Routledge.

Hollebeek, L.D., 2017. Developing business customer engagement through social media engagement-platforms: An integrative SD logic/RBV-informed model. Industrial Marketing Management.

Felix, R., Rauschnabel, P.A. and Hinsch, C., 2017. Elements of strategic social media marketing: A holistic framework. Journal of Business Research, 70, pp.118-126.

Tuten, T.L. and Solomon, M.R., 2017. Social media marketing. Sage.

Nevin, S., Gleasure, R., O'Reilly, P., Feller, J., Li, S. and Cristoforo, J., 2017, August. Social Identity and Social Media Activities in Equity Crowdfunding. In Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (p. 11). ACM.

Young, K.S. and Travis, H.P., 2017. Oral communication: Skills, choices, and consequences. Waveland Press.

Cleveland, L.M. and Reinsvold, R.J., 2017. Development of Oral Communication Skills by Undergraduates that Convey Evolutionary Concepts to the Public. Journal of microbiology & biology education, 18(1).

Anewalt, K. and Polack, J., 2017, March. A Curriculum Model Featuring Oral Communication Instruction and Practice. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (pp. 33-37). ACM.

Mandeville, D.S., Ho, T.K. and Valdez, L.A.V.L.A., 2017. The Effect Of Problem Based Learning On Undergraduate Oral Communication Competency. Journal of College Teaching & Learning (Online), 14(1), p.1.

Priya, C.S., Mekala, S. and Shabitha, M.P., 2017. The Need for Oral Communication in Large and Medium Enterprises of the Manufacturing Sector of India. IUP Journal of Soft Skills, 11(2).

Jain, A., 2017. Workplace Communication Skills for Students’ Placement: Workplace Training and University Preparation.