Enhance Your Skills By Belonging to Professional Organizations

If you work in information technology, how do you keep both your social and technical skills up-to-date to remain competitive? Enrolling in an academic program could be beneficial to improving your skills, but it could get expensive and often a technical curriculum will not cover the latest technologies. This is where belonging to a professional organization may be an option.

Social Skills

No matter what line of work you are in, everybody could use some improvement in their social skills. Unless you speak regularly to groups in your profession, the venues for you to practice public speaking are limited.

Toastmasters International is an organization that I have recently joined. Toastmaster’s provides a venue and focuses on helping members develop leadership, communication and public speaking skills. Most people would be apprehensive about joining an organization like this because of their fear of public speaking, but the reason Toastmasters exists is to help overcome this fear in a supporting environment.

Leadership

You acquire leadership skills by taking on roles each week to help out your fellow members. Some of the roles are:

Toastmaster - The M.C. for that day’s meeting.

Timer - Keeps track of each speaker’s time.

‘Ah’ Counter – Identify filler words that speakers use (e.g. er, um, ah, but, so, etc.)

Evaluator - Ensures speakers follow the guidelines of their prepared speeches.

Table Topics Master – Facilities a session known as Table Topics or speaking off-the-cuff.

Communication & Public Speaking

At all meetings there is an opportunity to speak by giving a prepared speech or participating in table topics. If you fulfill one of the roles above, you must present your findings to the group.

If this sounds like something you are interested in, I encourage you to contact a local club and attend a meeting as a guest to see firsthand how Toastmasters could help you. Membership fees can vary by club, but the cost is usually less than $100 for the year.

Technical Skills

With technology changing as fast as it does these days, learned skills can become obsolete very quickly. Fortunately there are plenty of online tutorials and books/magazines available so you can advance your skills through self-study. I think the difficulty lies in determining what you should study because there are so many technologies out there. I’ve read blogs where people ask “What programming language should I learn?” One possible answer to this question is: try learning different ones. If you want to commit yourself to life-long learning about new topics, consider joining a technical professional organization.

ACM

I recently joined the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ACM provides access to journals, magazines, online courses and books. The selling point for me was their collection of online books. For the price of a couple of technical books, I can access over 1,000 books online. ACM also provides a monthly email consisting of several articles related to your interests. These are just a few of the benefits that they provide. ACM offers two levels of yearly membership the basic membership is $99 USD and if you want the basic plus access to their Digital Library $198 USD.

IEEE

IEEE is a little less focused than ACM and covers a wider range of fields such as physical sciences, biology, law, as well as, the computing fields. IEEE provides access to numerous journals and magazines, but did not offer access to the same book catalog as ACM. The cost of a yearly IEEE membership is $169 USD.

Networking

The added benefit of belonging to either a social or technical professional organization is the opportunity to network. These organizations often host conferences several times a year, where you can meet people who share your interests and are in your field of work.

What are some other professional organizations that you belong to?