Andrew Murphy, soft skill expert, with a combination of over 13 years of professional software engineering experience and a passion for leadership and communication skills.
Andrew, originally from the UK, is Australia based and has a consulting business on communication and leadership skills.
Main Points
- Andrew and I start with a brief definition of soft skills and the benefit of honing soft skills
- Then we follow by Andrew’s self-introduction and his career history with both IT hard skills and soft skills
- We talked about step 1 of learning soft skills – acknowledge that we all need to learn it and are willing to dedicate time to learn it.
- Andrew also shares that everybody CAN learn soft skills
- Andrew answers my question about how I should start after being convinced?
- How can I get true feedback about my soft skills? Andrew gives very good tips
- Where should I put the learning-soft-skills task into my to-do list?
- Why software engineers should also emphasize on this?
- Andrew also shares a list of resources that he considers great
- In the end, Andrew shares the top 5 important soft skill points: communication, giving feedback, influencing, conflict resolution, resilience.
Links
- Andrew’s LinkedIn
- Andrew’s company website
- Simon Sinek’s book – Start With Why
- Simon Sinek’s book – Leaders Eat Last
- Andrew’s talk about communication model
- Book: The manager’s path
Video Teaser
My Takeaway for Soft Skills
The awareness about soft skills is already out there on the internet. There are even very successful podcasts talking about soft skills for developers, such as Soft Skills Engineering.
I learned from our guest Andrew that there is no magic to hone soft skills: prioritize it, spend time on it, rinse and repeat.
In addition, as discussed in this podcast, recording, and replay is a great way to gauge and improve.
At last, Simon Sinek’s books are epics, which I have already read before.
The book – The manager’s path, I’m halfway done after the chat with Andrew. I confirm that it is a REALLY REALLY good book targeted for IT technical people. you won’t regret reading it.
If you enjoy this episode, you might wanna check Personal Branding episode from David Liu.
Contact Me
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Take care, until next time :)!
