Better communication skills can lead to better career opportunities

Recently, I’ve been touring meetups to talk about why developers benefit from writing a blog. One of the benefits I talk about in that is that writing blog posts is a great practice for becoming a better communicator.

A couple of years ago I wrote to IT students encouraging them to take creative writing classes which is tightly tied to this same idea.

As developers, we communicate constantly and a lot of it happens in written form. The code we write is more written for other developers than the computer and when we choose our variable, function, class or interface names, we communicate their purpose. The computer doesn’t care what you name them, they are purely for other people to read and understand.

We (hopefully) write commit messages and pull request descriptions; we discuss ideas and we may write some reports or specs or meeting minutes; we write documentation and the remote and hybrid work has increased the need for written communication in the daily social chatting at the workplace.

Becoming better at communication can have a big impact on your career. The higher up you go in the corporate ladder or the more senior you become in the team, the more communication your work contains. You may do less nitty gritty implementation detail and more higher level planning, team leadership or stakeholder correspondence to achieve your goals.

This can be seen as a cause and effect: as your career advances, the amount of communication needs increases.

But it’s also true in inverse: the better you become at your communication, the more opportunities you’ll have for career advancement.

Working on your communication skills doesn’t only better prepare you for those new roles and responsibilities but can accelerate the rate at which you reach them.

If you’re great at selling ideas and convincing people, the company will have more use of you in the roles that require those skills.

There are many ways you can improve your communication skill. Writing a personal blog is a great one because you have full control of what, when and how you communicate. And all the effort you put into your personal blog will yield fruit in variety of ways and are not limited to your current job.