Technical skills vs word salads

[SanctusInDistress]

Why is it that the only way to progress in a career is to have excellent ability to make word salads instead of technical ability?

I have an enormous amount of technical knowledge, but I’m not very good with the word salad bit therefore my career progression is:

• stay in middle management hell forever
• drop down to a less-paid technical role and carry on watching slow car crashes in motion when the word salad gurus are unable to grasp technical details.

anybody else feel like me? Why is technical
skills so undervalued in the UK?! The only way to progress seems to be based on sales skills. This means only sales people get to the top which means they recruit more of their own kind, and so little by little you see organisations losing their way because senior management is packed with sales types, and so the complexities of ‘technicalities’ just get forgotten in the short term until the shit hits the fan. And at this point middle management and the operational layer have to put out the fire they saw coming a year or two ago.

I totally understand what you’re saying, and I agree with you.

I think ultimately there comes a point where it’s a case of having to join them, or change your approach/expectations, and by that I mean considering going self employed or deciding that the bullshit is intolerable and accepting a lower salary or career progression.

I think it’s quite industry dependent. What industry are you in?

In my experience it’s not about “word salad”, it’s about having the skills that actually run the business. For most companies the ability to bring the work in is pretty key. However, it is usually balanced by also having some senior specialists in leadership to ensure product quality (whatever that product may be). Is that not the case at your company?

Public sector.

Ha! I knew it would be . Yes huge swathes of the public sector don't value technical ability at all. It's a really frustrating aspect of working in it. I don't know what the solution is but I sympathise with the problem

Forgive my ignorance, but what kind of sales skills are they using in Public Sector? (Obviously public sector is enormous and could be almost anything, but in my experience not often sales).

The ability to say ‘everything is awesome’ whilst standing in front of a mangled mess.

the ability to speak for 20 minutes without a break and lots of impressive-sounding words but without actually saying anything meaningful.

the ability to turn a request for more support into ‘yes I’ll take on the extra project and I’m sorry I even asked for more support’

the ability to say ‘not my problem’ with a smile on your face.

thats what I mean by ‘sales skills’.

Those are management skills and at the top of most organisations are people with the Sam's management skills.

It is undervalued by those being managed but organisations actually do need people who can get the most out of a workforce.

And the ability to persuade people who aren't technical experts that you know what you are talking about and are amazing. Even when you have huge skill and knowledge gaps

A well run organisation needs a variety of skill sets and respect for what everyone is bringing to the table.

Your distain for your colleagues and certain types of skill is evident and probably not going to help you with career progression.

Technical skills are the cornerstone of any industry, public or private, but without people to make them financially viable, effectively communicated and delivered to deadline they’re of limited use.

Not my argument, but I do think you have a point OP. Those remarks are awful. They aren't anything to do with sales, though.

But surely they need some level of technical knowledge too so they can grasp the realities of the problems?!

perhaos this explains a lot why the UK is so stagnant, too many people with the exact same skill set at the top table so little scope for proper blue sky thinking

(yes that old blue sky thinking chestnut which ironically I see senior management talking about so much but then failing at the implementation because at meetings they are all so busy trying to word-salad each other that no concrete actionable decisions are made because they don’t actually have enough knowledge to confidently give the go-ahead for tangible actions).

Depends on the technical skills I guess. Reporting and governance / risk management no longer pays well if you don’t have Power BI / data modelling / sql skills too. The days when you could walk into one of those roles and ‘manage’ risk rather than identify, analyse trends / create pipelines is well and truly over.

Similarly written communication skills like minuting / Report writing / policy writing are also less valuable than they used to be now as there are now apps that can do it for you. Some public sector bodies even use Gen AI for policy writing because this sector lends itself well to it.

There are also a lot of ‘technical skills’ in the public sector that are unique to the public sector because of how difficult the sector is to get things done. AI is changing it, making things easier, so it makes sense that people with ‘faciliating’ skills are losing their jobs.

My manager is a “word salad” type. He speaks and writes absolute gibberish using lots of unnecessary words that mostly don’t even make sense. I have to spend time trying to decipher WTH he actually means.

it drive me absolutely nuts.

I’ve worked for over 30 years and have never come across anyone who is as bad as this. I think he thinks it makes him sound smarter. It doesn’t. He sounds like a tosser who is trying to sound smarter than he is.

no advice but lots of sympathy.

I agree with all of this, very strongly.

But is it possible you are feeling a bit burned out OP? Your contempt for your colleagues isn’t really a normal mindset, and must be quite difficult both for you and them over the longer term.

Technical skills aren't the same as management skills, but in many industries, you can rise so far in technical roles, and then you're expected to go into management if you want to rise further, regardless of whether you're actually suited for that. It's very prevalent in IT, but I am sure it also happens in other fields.

In my previous company, they did develop a separate technical path, though in practice to get yo the higher levels, you mostly had to be in the USA.

Totally agree OP. Long term civil servant here and I am in the same position