IT's Emotional Intelligence
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We know the stereotype: IT professionals are terrible at people skills. IT pros understand bits and bites much better than flesh and blood. I've long thought it was a legacy stereotype: IT people work too closely with too many people, interact with too many different functions and departments, to get away with being troglodytes. So I'm glad to spot some research that punches a hole in this. |
TalentSmart, a San Diego consulting firm that specializes in training managers and workers in "emotional intelligence," just published a study in TalentSmart's newsletter of emotional intelligence among 13,000 workers. The study focused on five different job functions: IT, engineering, finance, sales and customer service. It turns out that IT/IS professionals score, on average, the same as sales people and finance; these three groups of professionals don't do quite as well as customer service, but they do considerably better than engineers..
Travis Bradberry and Lac D. Su, the authors of the study (entitled "Emotional Intelligence and Job Function"), sum it up this way:
Contrary to popular belief, EQ scores were consistent across various job functions─except for engineering who scored slightly lower than average. It's likely that engineers are not rewarded much for effective relationships with others. Especially when compared to jobs like customer service professionals--the only group who scored higher than average.
Comments (2)
I am not agreeing with this phenomena. I think its mis-matching what Engineers stereotypes are, actually they are more serious and straight rather then twisted and word craft pretenders.
So all in all they are more focus towards the real output and value of a product they work on, developed and researched. e.g, Thomas Edison does not have any girl friend.
Posted by Zeeshan Haq | July 24, 2007 11:31 PM
Results are only as good as the tests.
I don't so much question the results, but mention this because there is no standard way to measure emotional IQ (EI); there is no verification or validation of the testing method.
As for myself, I have taken several tests for EI, and scored highly on all of them except one, a short ten-question one in a magazine on which I score slightly above average.
Posted by James Igoe | August 15, 2007 7:35 AM