Industries cooperating with IT world see a lack of soft skills among specialised people. A problem with communication, time-consuming translation from business language to technical language, and misunderstanding of requirements – does it sound familiar? Although the world runs forward, there is a stereotype that a programmer is a person who can communicate only with a computer.
Because of that, it’s great news that there is an IT company, which has got no problem with that! They’ve created a team of programmers – persons who are great not only at an understanding of customer’s needs but who also share their knowledge through public speaking and presentations during conferences.
Except for teamwork skills, propensity to change and communicativeness, one of the most important soft skills in IT industry is sharing knowledge. And it’s not about necessary skills in daily work of programmer such as an introduction of new employees to the project or training for salesperson about created software.
It’s critical to talk about brilliant possibilities of the most modern technologies, which they have if they are implemented in a proper way. Because of that, public speaking is a crucial element of IT environment. That’s ability to share knowledge in a professional way in front of a broad group of people from beyond the industry.
Importance of public speaking
IT specialists often have a very high level of technical knowledge. But if they don’t have soft skills on a proper level, they are only getting to a narrow group of listeners. A development of IT industry is possible only if experts in their areas will help their colleagues to step outside a programming and to teach them good practices. It’s all about co-creating next generations of so much-needed specialists in that way. Public speaking is an element, that is blocking high-specialised IT representatives. If they have a lack of soft skills, it may block a development of a whole industry.
A team of speakers built with specialists
In response to that phenomenon, we have created own initiative under the name of SoftwareHut Speaking. It is a custom-made group of people who are committed to sharing their knowledge with the rest of IT world. We want to talk about good practices, IT project management, and testing software. We speak up during many conferences, meetups, and workshops all around the Poland. At least for now. 😉 Check our schedule!
The constant building of brand awareness and competitiveness improvement – in such words Robert Strzelecki, CEO of SoftwareHut, explains an idea of creating SoftwareHut Speaking group – We have many experts in their fields aboard. They are not only coding but also can speak about programming during conferences, write blog posts and even publish a book. For that activity, we pay the same money as for the programming. It’s their real contribution. We appreciate that, and we are happy that such people are a part of our team.
A mentor and a leader
A person responsible for their support and professional development is Maciej Aniserowicz. He is a programmer, pragmatic trainer and an author of the most famous Polish blog for developers – devstyle.pl. He is also an organiser of “Daj się poznać” contest and one of Polish Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professional) in .NET category. Apart from his ongoing support, our employees take part in regular training courses and workshops on self-presentation techniques, and thanks to them, they improve their remittance, narration, and stage performance.
For us, programming is a value we need to pass on to the others. We are changing a stereotype by working on a living organism, and that’s what IT community is. It’s people and their world, scattered teams, international projects, new methodologies such as Agile and a must to talk about what we do, even in our team. That’s why soft skills are an essential requirement for a programmer who wants to move his career in a right direction – says Mateusz Andrzejewski, CTO at SoftwareHut.
Upcoming events
If you want to meet and listen to a speaker from SoftwareHut, the nearest occasion will be on 3rd April in Warsaw. Karol Rogowski will be there on 4Developers conference, and his topic is “Make C# objective again”. Karol is a programmer with a vast experience, an author of articles published in programming magazines, co-organiser of meet.js Białystok, and an author of “Świat poza jQuery“.
Full schedule of our presentations is available there: http://softwarehut.com/speaking
