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Effectively Communicating Difficult Concepts
Lately, I have become aware of something that is stunting my professional growth. While I am a fast learner with decent communication skills, I struggle with explaining difficult concepts… even if I understand them well.
For nearly four months I have been employed in my first role as a Business Analyst. After only just recently graduating out of college, I am only a trainee but I have had the opportunity to work on really wonderful and fun work assignments that I have exceled at. Other than the one time that I missed a deadline, because I should have managed an urgent project better, I have received terrific feedback on my assignments and have not gotten yelled at yet. The next step for me to complete my training and be promoted is to get through a client interview.
While client interviews are considerably easier than most job interviews, in addition to describe your background, you are also asked to effectively explain difficult concepts. My first client interviews did not go well. The managers who arranged it thought that I would do wonderfully and really excel at it, they were looking forward to hearing that I received the assignment.
When it came time for the interview with an insurance client, I had a difficult time explaining the quality of a claim and the software development life cycle. Likely for these reasons, failure to explain these concepts in a correct manner resulted in me not receiving the assignment. This failure is not something that I want to happen again.
I did not realize my ineffectiveness at explaining concepts until I found myself in insurance revision sessions held by another employee. He told me that he had been the one to grade my tests and was surprised to see that I needed more training on these concepts, because on the tests I had always shown that I had a strong explanation. In his perspective, it is more that I need to work on explaining them, so that others can understand what I am talking about.
I do not want my company to start viewing me as a liability or not be able to further my experience with two or three years, so that I can interview for other jobs and do well on my interviews becoming a top candidate for many of the positons that I desire and feel like I deserve.
Has anyone else had a difficult time explaining concepts? Are there any suggestions on improvements that I could make? I already asked my boss to arrange mock phone interview sessions with me. He was proud of my initiative, and said that while it is a difficult road, he is very interested in helping me out. Are there any books that I could read?
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I believe I know your problem. You know the concepts and you can do the work. You even test well your problem is actually one of selling.
When presenting a client with a concept you are not only presenting the concept you have to sell the concept and yourself as well. Now you are sitting there saying I am not a sales person. But you are you just don't realize it. Everyday we make a number of sales before we even walk out the door to go to work starting with selling ourselves with getting out of bed.
Now add in the prospect of trying to explain to someone your work product who may have no idea of what you are talking about. You can come off condescending the death knell to any sale or negotiation.
This is all correctable e with a little training in sales techniques. I suggest you look into one of the Dale Carnegie Course. I've seen his courses do wonders for people like you. Once you get comfortable with the need to sell yourself as well as the concept of what your presenting you will have much greater success.
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