The Quantified Communications Blog

Think about the last presentation you gave, whether it was to your employees, your investors, or your customers. What was your goal? What did you want your audience to understand at the end of your talk? More importantly, what did you want them to do as a result of listening to you?

Everywhere you look in the weeks leading up to and following New Year’s Eve, people are making predictions for the year to come. Economic forecasts, political projections, pop culture forecasts. You name it, we’re predicting it.

More and more in our evolving economy, we hear that employers are struggling to find applicants with the critical job skills they’re looking for (chief among them being communication), and that struggle has led to calls for higher education institutions to shift their focus from a broad liberal arts education to a more concrete, skills-based curriculum.

Think back to your college days, and imagine a lecture hall packed with hundreds of students. The professor, wearing a body mic or standing behind a lectern, looks like a spec to the people in the balcony, who take furious notes (or don’t) as she lectures. Every single day.

As educational technology (“ed tech”) carves out a growing space for itself in classrooms at all levels, the proliferation of vendors and offerings has led to an understandable mistrust of the hundreds of flashy tools promising instantaneous improvements and rapid transformations in the classroom.

Once upon a time, leadership was a little more standard than it is today. Would-be executives emerged from MBA programs into a corporate world in which, for the most part, they knew what to expect. Business as usual was the norm. Today, however, the status quo is anything but, with the World Economic Forum reporting on a number of factors that have led to a period of dramatic change in the world of work:

Online learning often gets a bad rap. As we’ve written before, the remote, automated nature of these programs can make them feel too low-touch to provide the same quality learning experience students can receive in the classroom. And often, that’s the case. When each student is simply clicking through a standardized lesson and answering a few multiple choice questions at the end, it’s no wonder the learning feels superficial.

There’s a problem plaguing corporate learning and development leaders: to put it simply, they can’t get trainings to “stick” in employees’ brains, so they struggle to achieve significant returns on investments—not to mention increases in productivity and engagement.

According to the Graduate Management Admission Council, 89 percent of employers are planning to increase the number of MBA graduates they hire, and they expect to offer those MBA grads a median starting salary of $110,000 compared to $60,000 for those with only a bachelor’s. So what’s setting those MBA grads ahead of the pack? According to the vast majority of survey respondents, communication and teamwork. 

If there’s one thing our professors, mentors, and advisors drilled into us as we prepared to finish school it’s that networking, and building a robust group of professional contacts, is foundational to a successful career. But for many of us, the traditional idea of networking— waltzing into a room full of strangers and yukking it up while trying to balance a drink, a tiny hors d’oeuvres plate, and endless handshakes—sounds like nothing short of torture.

Unfortunately, all those people who preach networking are right.

Fortunately, there’s more than one way to go about it.