Let’s begin by answering the question that is probably on the mind of anyone enrolled in an introductory English Communications course: Why are you here? It’s probably not because you chose this course out of your natural enthusiasm for English classes. It’s because it is a requirement to advance in the program and graduate.

So why would the program administrators require you to take this course? Is it just a money grab? No is the short answer to the second question. The answer to the first: because you need sharp communication skills to be able to apply the core skills you’re learning in the other courses throughout your program. This textbook’s first section expands on that answer in more detail so that you can proceed through this course in the right frame of mind. None of your course’s lessons make sense unless you realize that communications skills are not merely nice-to-have assets in your program, on the job, and in life, but absolutely necessary to your survival in this social world and tough economy.

• 1.1.1: Communications vs. English Courses
• 1.1.2: Communication Skills Desired by Employers
• 1.1.3: A Diverse Skillset Featuring Communications is Key to Survival
• 1.1.4: Communication Represents You and Your Employer

1.1.1: Communications vs. English Courses

Whether students enter their first-year college Communications courses right out of high school or with years of work experience behind them, they often fear being doomed to repeat their high school English class, reading Shakespeare and writing essays. Relief comes when they discover that a course in Communications has nothing to do with either of those things. Why should it when no one in the modern workplace speaks in a Shakespearean dialect or writes expository essays? If not High School English 2.0, what is Communications all about, then?

For our purposes, Communications (yes, with a capital C and ending with an s) is essentially the practice of exchanging information with others in the workplace and in other professional contexts. Absolutely every job—from A to Z, accountant to Zamboni mechanic—involves dealing with people all day long. You may deal with customers or clients, managers, coworkers, stakeholders (people and organizations you deal with, such as suppliers), professional organizations, investors, banks, regulators, maybe union representatives, the public, media, students, and so on depending on the nature of the job.

When dealing with each of these audiences, professionals adjust the way they communicate according to well-known conventions. You wouldn’t speak with a customer or client the same way you would a long-time friendly co-worker, nor would you speak with or email your manager them same way you would either of the others. As you’ll see in more detail when you get to §4.5.1.2 on code-switching between levels of formality, learning those communication conventions is certainly easier and more useful than learning how to interpret a Shakespeare play. If you communicate effectively—that is, clearly, concisely, coherently, correctly, and convincingly—by following those conventions, you can do a better job of applying your core technical skills, whether they be in sales, the skilled trades, the service industry, health care, office management, the government, the arts, and so on.

A course in Communications brings your existing communication skills up to a professional level by focusing on how to follow conventions for interacting with those various audiences in a variety of channels—whether communicating in person, by video conference or phone, email, text, or emojis, for instance. That professionals don’t generally start communicating by emojis with clients or managers (unless those clients or managers signal a preference for doing so first), for instance, is a convention that doesn’t occur naturally to some. Indeed, it may come as a surprise to some that you would risk embarrassing yourself and permanently undermining your credibility if you added emojis to a message sent to a manager or client before seeing them first establish a precedent for doing so. Because you are not born with an instinct for staying within the bounds of respectable professional communication, the channel conventions must be learned through observing how professionals communicate and through practicing that advanced standard both in college and beyond.

Some students will approach this course with years of professional experience behind them and will appreciate that the time and attention required for the communication aspect of any job is easy to underestimate. They will also appreciate that not abiding by those well-established communication conventions—by going rogue, freestyling communication styles, and cutting corners—often results in expensive miscommunication, embarrassment, and failure. To the audiences you deal with in the workplace, how well you communicate is a marker of your level of professionalism. It’s like your style of dress: a well-written email has the same effect as a nice suit or outfit worn in an office or a clean uniform worn by a service worker—it suggests detail-oriented competence. Major writing errors are like big stains down the front of that suit/outfit or revealing rips in that uniform—they make you look sloppy, foolish, and unreliable. Just as you spent at least a couple decades getting to where you are now as a communicator in whatever situation your find yourself, you need a college course to smooth out the rough edges of your communication skills and prepare you for the better, high-paying workplaces you aspire to—which is what you go to a vocational college for—in ways that your previous, low-paying work experience and/or high school English classes didn’t.

This isn’t to say that your high school English classes were useless, though few can claim that they prepared you adequately for the modern workplace. Arguably the movement away from English fundamentals (grammar, punctuation, spelling, style, mechanics, etc.) in Canadian high schools does a disservice to students when they get into their careers. In most well-paying jobs, early-career professionals quickly realize that stakeholders—customers/clients, managers, co-workers, etc.—tend to judge the quality of a person’s general competence by the quality of their writing (if that’s all they have to go on) and their speaking abilities. The topic of Communications, then, must include aspects of the traditional English class curriculum, at least in terms of the basics of English writing. However, the emphasis always returns to what is practical and necessary for succeeding in the modern workplace—wherever that is—not simply what is “good for you” in the abstract just because someone says so.

If you feel that you are a weak writer but an excellent speaker or vice versa, rest assured that weaknesses and strengths in different areas of the communication spectrum don’t necessarily mean that you will always be good or bad at communication in general. Weaknesses can and should be improved upon, as well as strengths built upon. It’s important to recognize that we all have more communication channels available to us than ever before, as well as rapidly improving assistive technologies such as AI that helps us master those channels. This means that the communication toolkit—from oral to written to nonverbal channels—is larger and more varied than ever before. Mere competence in using that toolkit effectively is no longer just a “nice to have” asset sought by employers; indeed, mastery over that toolkit is essential to career success.

1.1.2: Communication Skills Desired by Employers

If there’s a standalone reason for why you need communication skills to complement your technical skills, it’s that you don’t get paid without them. You need communication and “soft” skills to get work and keep working so that people will hire you and will continue to want to employ you to apply your core technical skills. A diverse skillset that includes communication is really the key to survival in the modern workforce, and hiring trends bear this out.

In its Employability Skills 2000+, the Conference Board of Canada lists “the skills you need to enter, stay in, and progress” in the 21st century workplace. The first category listed is communication skills, specifically how to:

• Read and understand information presented in a variety of forms (e.g., words, graphs, charts, diagrams)
• Write and speak so others pay attention and understand
• Listen and ask questions to understand and appreciate the points of view of others
• Share information using a range of information and communications technologies (e.g., voice, e-mail, computers)
• Use relevant scientific, technological, and mathematical knowledge and skills to explain or clarify ideas (Conference Board of Canada, n.d.)

Likewise, the non-profit National Association of Colleges and Employers in the US surveys hundreds of employers annually and has found that, in recent years, they consistently rank the following five soft skills as most desirable ahead of sixth-ranked technical skills:

1. Critical Thinking
2. Communication
3. Teamwork
4. Equity & Inclusion
5. Professionalism (NACE, 2021)

When employers list these interrelated soft skills as required competencies in their job postings, it’s not because they copied everyone else’s job ads. Almost all employers really do want to hire people with those skills. From experience, they know that such skills directly contribute to the success of any operation, whether in the public or private sector. They see that employees with those skills contribute to the smooth running of the operation, as well as ultimately help attract and retain revenue sources in the form of customers, client organizations, or other funding opportunities.

To secure employees (“human resources”) with those necessary skills, traditional hiring practices filter out applicants who have poor communication skills with a two-phase series of tests. This starts with a “written exam”—i.e., the résumé and cover letter. As documents that represent you in your physical absence, the résumé indicates whether you are detail oriented in how you organize information and the cover letter whether you can compose proper, grammatically correct sentences and paragraphs—as you will see later in Ch. 9: Job Applications. If you pass that written test and move on to the second phase, you are invited to the “oral exam,” where your face-to-face conversational skills are assessed. If you prove that you have strong and broad range of soft skills in this two-stage filter, especially if you come off as friendly, positive, and easy to work with in the interview, an employer will be more likely to hire you, keep you, and trust you with co-workers and clients.

The latest thinking in the human resources (HR) profession, however, is that both of those traditional filters are unreliable. Applicants can fake them. In recent years, employers have seen a flood of applications that they can tell were written by AI rather than in applicants’ authentic voices because the résumés and cover letters follow a generic formula structured around the same keywords, and most employers just discard them. The irony is that employers also use AI to filter out the applications that appear to be written by AI (Robinson, 2024; Shibu, 2024), which leaves many applicants in the cold. Likewise, job applicants can train for an interview and “fake it to make it” (Cuddy, 2012), then go back to being their less hireable selves in the workplace, which becomes an ongoing problem for their managers until they are finally “let go” (fired) with the next office “reorganization” (a pretense for getting rid of someone).

Recruiters at the most successful companies such as tech giant Google have looked at the big data on hiring and found that traditional criteria, including GPA and technical skills demonstrated in interview-process test scores, are poor predictors of how well a hire will perform and advance. New hires with only core technical skills, even if exceptionally advanced, don’t necessarily become successful employees; in fact, they are the most replaceable in any organization, especially in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) industries (Sena & Zimm, 2017). According to Business Insider, Google’s recruiters took an analytics approach like that portrayed in the 2011 film Moneyball and found that key predictors of success are instead personal traits, especially:

• Adaptability: the curiosity-driven agility to solve problems through independent, on-the-job learning
• Resilience: the “emotional courage” to persevere through challenges
• Diverse background: well-roundedness coming from exposure to multicultural influences and engagement in diverse extracurricular activities including sports
• Friendliness: being a “people person,” happy around others and eager to serve
• Conscientiousness: an inner drive to strive for detail-oriented excellence in completing tasks to a high standard without supervision (Patel, 2017, paras. 8-10)
• Professional presence: evidence of engaging in professional activities online
• Social and emotional intelligence: according to the CEO of Knack, a Silicon Valley start-up that uses big data and gamification in the hiring process to identify the traits of successful employees, “everything we do, and try to achieve inside organizations, requires interactions with others”; no matter what your profession or “social abilities, being able to intelligently manage the social landscape, intelligently respond to other people, read the social situation and reason with social savviness—this turns out to differentiate between people who do better and people who don’t do as well” (Nisen, 2013).

In other words, the quality of your communication skills in dealing with the various audiences that surround you in your workplace are the best predictors of professional success.

1.1.3: A Diverse Skillset Featuring Communications Is Key to Survival

Although an impressive top speeds of over 100km/h makes the cheetah the fastest land animal on the planet, that same specialization marks it for possible extinction. Like its distant ancestral cousin the saber-tooth cat, the evolutionary pursuit of a single advantage over prey becomes a dire liability when environmental circumstances change. Though the saber-tooth cat’s large, dagger-like canine teeth and powerful forelimbs served it well for preying on its megafauna menu for a couple million of years, those advantages worked against it when the drastic change of temperature at the end of the last ice-age drove most of its large prey to extinction. Its failure to adapt to the new menu resulting from climate change drove it towards the same fate. Likewise, though cheetahs are singularly well adapted to running down gazelles and impalas on the African savannahs, they lack the varied skillset and resilience necessary to pivot to another mode of predation with humanity’s continuing encroachment on its open-range habitat squeezing them into an evolutionary dead-end (World Wildlife Fund, 2025; Durant et al., 2016). Both large cats provide a telling tale of the dangers of excessive specialization in the race for survival amidst changing circumstances.

The picture painted by the above section’s insight into what employers are looking for in employees likewise tells us plenty about what we must do about our skillset to have a fighting chance in the fierce competition for jobs amidst frequent economic disruption due to constant technological innovation: diversify it and maintain a high level of communication skills. Gone are the days when a high school or college graduate would do one or two jobs throughout their entire career in the latter half of the twentieth century like the sabre-tooth cats in the late Pleistocene. Rather, if the current job-hopping trend continues, you can expect to run through 10-15 jobs throughout your working lifetime (Randstad, 2023, para. 2; Harris, 2015, para. 4), including periods of gigging for several employers at once (Schow, 2024; Mahdawi, 2017, para. 30), especially in your immediate post-graduation years.

Futurists tell us that the “gig economy” will evolve alongside advances in artificial general intelligence (AGI or powerful AI) and automation that will phase out jobs of a routine and mechanical nature with machines. On the bright side, jobs that require advanced communication skills will continue to be relatively safe for humans because AI and robots can’t so easily imitate them in a way that completely meets consumer needs and preferences. Taxi drivers, for instance, have been a threatened species like cheetahs for years with rideshare companies steadily encroaching on their territory, and they will certainly go extinct when the promised driverless car revolution arrives in the years ahead, along with truckers, bus drivers, and dozens of other auto- and transport-industry roles (Frey, 2016). They can resist, but the market will ultimately force them to retrain and find work that is hopefully more future-proof—work that prioritizes the human element. Many mature students at this very college have in fact taken multiple programs over the years, each representing an effort to develop new skills to break into another line of work after running up against limitations in their previous job.

Indeed, the Government of Canada’s Future Skills Centre estimates that about a fifth of Canadian jobs—especially low-paying ones—are at high risk of automation from the late 2020s to 2030s. Some of those will be eliminated outright, but most will be redefined by requiring new skillsets that cannot be automated so easily (Wyonch, 2024). The 36% of jobs at low risk of being eliminated by automation require either advanced soft skills and emotional intelligence featured in roles such as managers, nurses, and teachers (Lamb, 2016), creativity, or advanced STEM skills in developing and servicing those technologies (Mahdawi, 2017; Riddell, 2017).

Since the future of work is a series of careers and side-hustle gigging, communication skills are key to transitioning between them all. The gears of every career pivot and new job added to your résumé are greased by the soft skills that help convince your new employers and clients to hire you, or, if you strike out on your own, convince your new partners and employees to work with or for you. Career changes certainly aren’t the signs of catastrophe that they perhaps used to be; usually they mark moves up the pay scale so that you end your working life where you should: far beyond where you started in terms of both your role and income bracket.

You simply cannot make those career and gig transitions without communication skills. In other words, you will be stuck on the first floor of entry-level gigging unless you have the soft skills to lift you up and shop you around. A nurse who graduates with a diploma and enters the workforce stringing together a patchwork of part-time gigs in hospitals, care homes, clinics, and schools, for instance, won’t still be exhausted by this juggling act if they have the soft skills to rise to a full-time decision-making position in one of those places. Though the job will be technologically assisted in ways that it never had been before with machines handling the drudgerous, dangerous, and dirty work, the fundamental human need for human interaction and humane decision-making will keep that nurse employed and upwardly mobile. The more advanced your communication skills develop as you diversify your employable skillset while navigating the gig economy and the automated labour market, the further up the pay scale you’ll climb.

1.1.4: Communication Represents You and Your Employer

Imagine a situation where you, as a customer, are looking for a contractor for a custom job you need done on your car and you email several companies for a quote breaking down how much the job will cost. You narrow it down to two companies who have about the same price, and one gets back to you within 24 hours with a clear price breakdown in a PDF attached in an email that is friendly in tone and perfectly written. However, the other took four days to respond with an email that looked like it was written by a sixth-grader because it was rife with grammar errors in each sentence and an attached quote that was just a scan of some nearly illegible chicken-scratch writing. Comparing the communication styles of the two companies, choosing who you’re going to go with for your custom job is a no-brainer.

Of course, the connection between the quality of their communication and the quality of the job they’ll do for you isn’t water-tight—it’s correlation rather than causation—but, right or wrong, it’s a common heuristic (a quick-thinking, time-saving assumption), one that will likely always be made by most customers as they go about living their busy lives. The company representative who took the time to ensure their writing was clear and professional, even proofreading it to confirm that it was error-free and accurate, will probably take the time to ensure the job they do for you will be the same high-calibre work that is worth what you will pay for it. By the same token, we can assume that the rep who didn’t bother to proofread their email at all will likewise do a quick, sloppy, and disappointing job that will require you to demand they return to do it right—a hassle for which you probably have little-to-no time nor patience. Most of us are picky, judgmental consumers for obvious reasons: we are careful with our money and expect only the best work value for our dollar.

Good managers know that customers tend to be picky in the manner described above, so they hire and retain employees with the same scruples, which means they appreciate more than anyone that your writing represents you and your company. As tech CEO Kyle Wiens (2012) says, “Good grammar is credibility, especially on the internet” where your writing is “a projection of you in your physical absence.” Just as people judge flaws in your personal appearance such as a stain on your shirt or broccoli between your teeth, which are signs of a sloppy lack of self-awareness and personal care, so they will judge you as a person if it’s obvious from your writing that “you can’t tell the difference between their, there, and they’re” (para. 6).

As the marketing slogan goes, you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. If potential employers or clients (who are, essentially, your employers) see that you care enough about details to write a flawless email, they will jump to the conclusion that you will be as conscientious in your job and are thus a safe bet for hire. Again, it’s no guarantee of future success (correlation does not equal causation), but it increases your chances immeasurably. As Wiens says of the job of coding in the business of software programming, “details are everything. I hire people who care about those details” (paras. 12-13), but you could substitute “programmer” with any job title and it would be just as true.