Why are there only 12 signs of the zodiac?

I’ve got a few minutes to try and organise my random thoughts further. So I think that employability really comes down to three things:

1. Technical skills
2. Soft skills
3. Rapport at interview

Technical skills isn’t necessarily progamming skills, but they are the core skills and abilities that your profession – whatever that is needs. If you are a Java programmer then it’d be Java skills, maybe xml, etc… if you’re a brain-surgeon then I’d hope that a familiarity with how the cranium is and how to use a scalpel. If you can code python as well, that’s great but steady hand wins every time.

The soft skills I see as the ability to bring the technical skills you have into play. I tend to do analysis these days, so for a typical business or systems analysis type of role, this is about how I will interact with the people. How will I get them to articulate what they need and what they mean. This is where I pondered and came up with the slightly off-piste (it is the Winter Olympics, you know) “Why only 12 signs?”

I guess that I tend to break my professional working practices into a number of patterns – a slightly geeky way of looking at things, I know. Being able to overlay a framework helps me to understand how an organisation will work, and helps me to shape my thoughts about what they will want and how they will expect me to work with them.

Experience – good and bad – is about building up a portfolio of these patterns and trying to work out how to optimise how I work in any of these scenarios. So I guess the skill is in being able to understand the patterns, and being able to apply them.

If at this point you’re thinking this is way to techy, let me play you a simple scenario. If I get up and leave my office – as I walk out I close the door – and walk to the front-door, go through this and get into my car on the drive. I’ve just used three doors, each slightly different but nonetheless doors. I know a pattern for what to expect from a door, I know how a door operates and I can describe the functional characteristics of a door. Even my dear old mom could do this, she just wouldn’t realise that we are talking about a really quite complicated, involved method of analysis. To her this wouldn’t be a discussion of polymorphism or inheritance, it would be about describing what a door is.

Who’d have thought my mom could handle concepts we throw around in Object oriented design.