Communicate Like Your Career Depends on It (It Does)
Why technical expertise without communication skills is a career dead end
Hey, Prasad here 👋 I’m the voice behind the weekly newsletter “Big Tech Careers.”
In this week’s article, I share different aspects of communication and how it affects at different levels of your careers.
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This week I’m building on last week’s article, Communication Strategies That Open Doors. One of the readers asked an excellent question:
How does your approach to communication shift as you advance in your career?
Absolutely. Our communication must evolve as we advance professionally.
As you climb the professional ladder, the way you communicate needs to transform alongside your role. It creates a powerful cycle—mastering communication accelerates your growth, which in turn demands even stronger communication skills.
You’ve probably heard it before: “Great work speaks for itself.” That’s career suicide in disguise. In the tech industry, your ability to communicate effectively isn’t just a nice-to-have soft skill.
It’s the multiplier that determines whether you’ll spend your career buried in technical details or shaping the future of technology.
The Communication Paradox in Tech
The irony is stark. We build systems designed to connect billions of people, yet many technologists struggle to connect with the person sitting right next to them. We obsess over user interfaces and system architecture, but neglect the most critical interface of all: human-to-human communication.
This gap becomes more expensive with every rung you climb on the career ladder. At the junior level, poor communication might mean unclear commit messages or awkward standup updates. At the senior level, it means failed projects, missed promotions, and teams that don’t trust your technical judgment—no matter how brilliant it might be.
The Entry-Level Technologist: Building Your Foundation
The Communication Challenge: You’re absorbing massive amounts of information while trying to prove you belong in a technical environment.
What Matters Most:
Asking questions effectively – Frame questions with context: “I’m working on the API integration for user authentication. I’ve reviewed the existing documentation and tried implementing OAuth, but I’m encountering a 401 error at the token exchange step. Could someone help me understand what I might be missing?”
Clear documentation habits – Whether you’re writing technical specs, test plans, or project updates, your future self (and teammates) will thank you for explaining the “why” behind your decisions, not just the “what”
Status updates that inform – Instead of “still working on the authentication system,” try “completed requirements analysis, currently in design phase, identified three integration points that need stakeholder review”
Career Impact: These habits establish you as someone who thinks systematically and can be trusted with increasing responsibility. Poor communication at this level often results in extended oversight and slower progression to independent work.
The Mid-Level Professional: Becoming the Bridge
The Communication Challenge: You’re the crucial link between technical complexity and business objectives, often translating between different stakeholders with competing priorities.
What Matters Most:
Stakeholder-specific communication – Your project updates to engineering leadership should focus on technical risks and resource needs, while updates to business stakeholders should emphasize timeline, scope, and business impact
Technical documentation that scales – Whether you’re a solutions architect writing system designs, a project manager documenting requirements, or a technical analyst creating process flows, your documentation becomes the foundation for team decisions
Facilitation skills – You’re now leading technical discussions, requirements gathering sessions, and cross-functional meetings. Learn to synthesize complex information, identify decision points, and ensure everyone leaves aligned on next steps
Career Impact: This is where communication skills become a major differentiator. Technical professionals who can effectively bridge different domains and perspectives become indispensable and are positioned for leadership roles.
The Senior Technical Professional: Leadership Through Influence
The Communication Challenge: Your technical expertise carries weight across the organization, but success increasingly depends on your ability to guide and influence others rather than execute everything yourself.
What Matters Most:
Strategic storytelling – Whether you’re a senior architect proposing a system redesign, a project manager presenting a roadmap, or a technical lead advocating for process changes, you need to connect technical decisions to business outcomes: “This infrastructure redesign will reduce our incident response time from hours to minutes, directly supporting our uptime SLA commitments to enterprise clients”
Cross-functional leadership – You’re working with product, design, sales, and other departments. A solutions architect needs to explain technical constraints to sales teams, while a technical project manager must help engineering teams understand market pressures
Mentoring and knowledge transfer – Your communication directly shapes the growth of junior professionals. The difference between “that approach won’t work” and “here’s why we typically solve this differently, and here’s how to evaluate trade-offs for future decisions”
Career Impact: Senior professionals who communicate poorly create organizational friction and missed opportunities. Those who excel become trusted advisors who can align diverse teams around common goals.
The Principal/Staff Level: Organizational Influence
The Communication Challenge: Your influence extends across multiple teams, projects, and sometimes entire business units. Technical and strategic decisions have company-wide implications.
What Matters Most:
Executive communication – You’re presenting to C-level leadership regularly. This means translating technical initiatives into business value: “Our proposed API modernization will reduce integration time for new enterprise clients from 6 months to 6 weeks, directly impacting our ability to close deals in competitive situations”
Vision articulation – Whether you’re a principal architect defining technical strategy, a senior program manager outlining multi-year roadmaps, or a technical director setting department priorities, you need to create compelling narratives that align diverse stakeholders
Industry representation – Conference presentations, thought leadership content, and industry engagement that enhance both your reputation and your organization’s market position
Organizational change management – Your technical recommendations often require significant process or cultural changes, requiring sophisticated influence and persuasion skills
Career Impact: At this level, communication skills often determine success more than pure technical expertise. The most brilliant technical minds who can’t articulate their vision get overshadowed by professionals who can rally entire organizations around strategic initiatives.
The Technical Leader: Communication as Your Primary Multiplier
The Communication Challenge: Your success depends entirely on enabling others through clear direction, support, and organizational alignment.
What Matters Most:
Team enablement conversations – Whether leading engineering teams, architecture groups, or cross-functional project teams, your one-on-ones and team meetings directly impact productivity and retention. Master the art of asking diagnostic questions, providing actionable feedback, and creating psychological safety
Upward and lateral influence – Representing your team’s work and needs to senior leadership while building coalition support with peer leaders across the organization
Complex stakeholder management – Navigating competing priorities between technical teams, business units, and external partners requires nuanced communication strategies
Difficult conversations – Performance issues, resource constraints, strategic pivots, and technical debt decisions all require direct but tactful communication
Career Impact: Technical leaders who communicate poorly create organizational dysfunction and talent drain. Those who excel become magnets for top performers and consistently deliver results through others.
Universal Communication Principles for Tech Careers
Regardless of your current level, these principles accelerate career growth:
Clarity Over Cleverness: Your job is to be understood, not to impress people with your vocabulary or technical jargon. The smartest person in the room is often the one who can explain complex concepts simply.
Context Is King: Always provide enough background for your audience to understand not just what you’re communicating, but why it matters. “The API performance is degraded” versus “The customer-facing API response time increased from 200ms to 2s since yesterday’s deployment, affecting checkout completion rates and potentially impacting revenue.”
Listen More Than You Speak: The best communicators are often the best listeners. Ask clarifying questions. Repeat back what you heard. Make others feel heard before trying to be heard yourself.
Adapt Your Communication Style: A Slack message to your teammate should sound different from an email to your VP, which should sound different from a technical presentation to a client, which should sound different from a requirements gathering session with stakeholders.
Follow Up and Follow Through: Communication isn’t complete until action happens. “I’ll look into that” becomes “I investigated the database performance issue we discussed. Here’s what I found and here are the next steps.”
The Compound Effect
Here’s what many technologists miss: communication skills compound faster than technical skills. Mastering a new technology or methodology might make you 10% more effective. Learning to communicate clearly can make you 10x more effective by enabling you to leverage other people’s skills, knowledge, and resources.
The technologists who become CTOs, VPs of Engineering, or Chief Architects aren’t necessarily the ones with the deepest technical knowledge. They’re the ones who can articulate a vision, build consensus around it, communicate its value across the organization, and inspire others to execute it.
Your Communication Action Plan
This Week:
Record yourself explaining a technical concept you’re working on. How clear were you?
In your next code review, focus on the tone and helpfulness of your feedback
Ask for specific feedback on your communication in your next one-on-one
This Month:
Write a technical blog post, internal documentation, or process guide explaining something you recently learned or implemented
Volunteer to present at your team’s knowledge sharing session or lead a cross-functional workshop
Practice explaining your current project or area of expertise to someone from a different department
This Quarter:
Identify someone in your organization whose communication style you admire and study what makes them effective
Take on a project or initiative that requires extensive cross-functional collaboration
Start documenting not just what you’re delivering, but why you made specific technical or strategic decisions
The Bottom Line
Your career trajectory in tech isn’t just about your ability to solve complex problems—it’s about your ability to communicate those solutions in ways that inspire confidence, enable collaboration, and drive organizational results. The technical professionals who recognize this early and invest in their communication skills don’t just advance their careers; they shape entire industries.
In a field where technical knowledge becomes obsolete faster than ever, communication skills remain your most durable and transferable career asset. Start building them like your career depends on it.
Because it does.
Well said, and I wholeheartedly agree. A quick story that supports your points — I went from earning a Master’s in Counseling Psychology to owning a design-build-furnish firm. I never would have predicted how critical that training would be to the work I do now, but it all comes down to communication.
Being an effective communicator takes practice; it doesn’t just happen. I write regularly (some privately, some publicly), speak when it’s useful, and often help those around me navigate difficult conversations. It’s all part of staying grounded in the practice because yes—my career absolutely depends on it!
We learned to talk by observation, not instruction, during our first few years of life. If our folks and siblings were good story tellers, we had good role models.
Purposely observing folks in your life that are good and bad story tellers is a starting point for improvement. Hang out with them and notice their affect, intonation, and pacing. Pay less attention to what they say and more attention to how they say it. Then try to imitate them.