Interpersonal Skills Pre-Screened for Industrial Hiring
"But I don't NEED to communicate well in person. I want to work with machines [or electronics or robots or on an assembly line]."
If this is what you think as you launch – or continue – your job search, think again. Jobs that used to involve heavy supervisor-intervention are becoming more self-directed through work teams, eliminating or changing the supervisor role. As former industrial jobs grow increasingly computerized, a higher level of interaction and communication between workers becomes the norm. Case in point: take your car in for service to the dealer. The service area looks different from the past. Now it is clean, organized, and computerized. Technicians, instead of mechanics, work on your increasingly computerized car and need to communicate more clearly with each other – and with their own support network – in order to determine what ails your auto and fix it.
The hiring process for a changing (or changed!) industrial workplace is also transforming. More people look for these jobs; more jobs require greater interpersonal skills, initiative, and better decision-making; more weeding-out of job candidates at the initial stages of the interview process is happening.
Testing for the skills needed to succeed in self-directed work team environments includes a multi-stage, multiple-people process on both the hiring end as well as the job-searcher end. I found this article that is a good description of such testing and evaluating at the front-end of the job interview process.
Regardless of your education level or prior job experiences, your ability to communicate, interact, cooperate, and collaborate with your peers – in person – may determine how successful you are in securing your next "worker-level" job. Keep this in mind while you text, tweet, friend, and link. Develop your in-person "people skills", also.