Speaking about 14 most promising IT technologies of the next five years we cannot but mention social skills (the previous posts – Rich Internet Applications for “rich” software development and 14 technologies that won’t become obsolete before 2014: foundations of software development).

#7. Social skills.

Of course we don’t mean such tings as psychological and oratorical skills for programmers. Software developers may not need books like «How to win friends and influence people». Nevertheless they often face with customers and need to speak common language with them.

Business and software are closely connected with each other. Specialists can’t change their business processes without proper changes in their software. For example, Chief Financial Officer can’t change the accounting rules without working with IT department to update the system. And call center can’t optimize its work without IT specialists updating the CRM workflow. So customers often need to work directly with the development team to make sure that their requirements were properly reflected in developed software products.

So developers are more and more involved in non-development meetings and processes to provide feedback control. And those specialists who can acquire skills of affective communication will be highly valued in labor market.