Employers resoundingly state that the ability to communicate with others and in small groups is essential. Surveys show that employers want schools to teach students these communication skills so that employees are prepared when they enter the work force. Since people spend about 40% of their time listening and 30% speaking, they need these essential skills: to be effective listeners and clear, assertive, nondefensive and informative speakers. Listening and speaking are interconnected skills and are essential to improving personal and professional relationships.

Listening
As important as speaking is, however, we tend to spend far more time listening than we do talking. And for the most part, we are terrible listeners. While a person speaks, we often are preparing our response to that person instead of giving our complete attention to their message, or we tend to interrupt people as they speak. Effective listening requires you to be able to understand, empathize with or paraphrase the other person's words before you think about your response. We are not born good listeners; we must learn how to be active, not passive, listeners. Examples that you might include in this part of the portfolio include notetaking from any class or event you go to as part of a class.

Speaking
Having someone understand what you say is more problematic than you think. We all make the assumption that we can say what we mean and that people will understand everything we say. Communication is not that easy. We often do not say exactly what we mean, and even when we do, words often have different meanings to different people. Thus, we are misunderstood. Learning to speak effectively requires the speaker to think carefully about how to say something and how much explanation is needed when saying that something so that listeners have a better chance of understanding the speaker. Examples that you might include in this part of the portfolio include outlines of oral presentations, a written, prepared speech, or an audio clip of an actual speech you did for some class.