Communication Skills: Learn Strengths and Potential Areas of Improvement (Research Paper Sample)

Communication Skills and Assessment
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Communication Skills and Assessment
Communication skills remain a critical element in our lives as they facilitate communication with friends, family, and co-workers. According to Baack (2012), communication is the transmission, receiving as well as the processing of information. Besides, information is made up of items that evoke or have meaning. In the process of gathering information for writing this personal assessment, I considered the feedback offered by my managers. To be an excellent communicator, one should be cognizant of all communication aspects from the onset (Pauley & Pauley, 2009). According to Robles (2012), communication skills are requisite soft skills in the performance of any job. People with outstanding communication skills comprehend their roles as communicators and can vividly state their messages clearly to others. Therefore, I have completed a self-assessment of my communication skills to learn my strengths and potential areas of improvement.
I searched for Personal Communication Assessment from Google for assessment of personal communication skills. This Google search provided an assessment by the Mind Tools Editorial Team on www.Mindtools.com. Then, the website offers several short quizzes for assessing communication skills. These quizzes are divided into four varied sections, namely reading, writing, listening, and speaking effectively. After completion of the quizzes, a score rating communication skills is given. As a result, the score obtained indicates your communication skills’ strength and weakness level. A score ranging from 15-35 is an indication that you should work on your skills whilst a score ranging from 36-55 indicates that you are an able communicator, whereas scoring 56-75 shows excellent communication skills. My score was 55, which classified me as an able communicator although I encounter slight communication challenges sometimes (Mindtools, n.d.).
From the website, my communication gaps occur when decoding and encoding messages. In respect to these gaps, when encoding messages, the website guides that it is helpful to understand what I wish to say and decide on how best to say it during verbal communication. In the case of written communication, I should write what should be perceived according to my intentions (Mindtools, n.d.). Concerning decoding, where the message’s receiving and interpretation occurs, I obtained 70%, which shows that I ought to allow the other party to talk and listen attentively. Consequently, this will enable me to appropriately decode messages according to the sender’s intentions as well as pay attention to the messages.
Therefore, additional training is required to enhance my communication skillset. In this regard, it is critical to examine what is working well for me since it has been a long process (The University of Arizona, 2016). Moreover, enhancing my communication skillset requires awareness when sending any message by taking some time to collect my thoughts, followed by the message’s relay and understanding how the recipients perceive any message. Regarding written text, I ought to take time when writing by re-reading messages prior to sending them.
Finally, to prepare for my career advancement as the store manager, I will take advantage of corporate-sponsored pieces of training like E-learning modules, which wi