A breakdown of the proportion of the important factors that require communication skills to maintain effective communication with external and internal companies between 1997 and 2006, a 10-year period is showed in the table. Overall, it is evident that the most crucial external communication skills which are considered the highest is dealing with people, while listening carefully to colleagues is the most essential aspect in line of internal communication skills.
In the first survey of external communication, it can be seen that dealing with people experienced increased from 60 percent to 65 percent. Having the similarity with factor before, knowing of particular products or services and advising or caring for customers increased considerably in 2006. The survey showed approximately 3-6% increment compared to years 1997. However, the subset selling a product or service fell around 21 percent in 2006.
Moving to a more detailed analysis from the table, it reveals that listening carefully to the colleagues was considered by people as the crucial aspect of internal communication skills. Furthermore, the second important skill was training people which rose around 30 percent in 2006. In contrast, the least essential factor of this category was making speech or presentation which increased approximately 11 percent in 2006.
