Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a communications center specialist and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
A communications center specialist is responsible for receiving, examining, and prioritizing emergency or non-emergency calls and deploys the relevant authorities to manage different situations. He/she retrieves and disseminates information gathered from multiple phone calls and evaluates the incoming calls including fire, medical, security calls, to gauge the best response for each of the incidents.
Other duties include finding more information concerning the reported event as well as to provide the police and other response officials with the necessary info to rescue the situation while ensuring their safety. The specialist offers the most appropriate intervention for distraught callers until they get help. Lastly, they enter the information gathered in the center's computerized system as well as processing, analyzing, and disseminating it.
Core Skills Required to be a Communications Center Specialist
Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.
Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.
A communications center specialist should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Safety at work:
Safety is being protected from hurt or other non-desirable outcomes that may tend to overrule a situation and cause damages of different kinds.
A Communications Center Specialist must learn to keep the organization safe from different risks by developing a high sense of alertness that detects danger from afar and stops it before it causes risk, danger or injury in the organization.
Delegation:
Delegation is assigning responsibility or authority to another person a junior or subordinate to carry out specific activities while remaining accountable for the outcome.
A Communications Center Specialist must be equipped with skills on how to make the delegation work correctly to save the organization time and money and to allow the subordinate make wise decisions, skills, and motivation to become better and grow the company.
Planning and Scheduling:
Planning and Scheduling are the act of establishing a plan for a set of tasks that needs to be completed and including when they should be done.
A Communications Center Specialist needs creativity in balancing both planning and scheduling by clearing defining what and how activities will be carried out by when and who in particular to ensure there are a clear flow and accountability to every staff.
Enthusiasm:
Enthusiasm is an intense enjoyment or a lively interest in a certain thing with a zest and a strong belief that can be felt by those around you.
A Communications Center Specialist ought to be enthusiastic as well as create a friendly atmosphere that makes the staff comfortable with the surroundings, with the other employees to create a less passive working place.
Self Confidence:
Self Confidence is the ability to know who you are and what you are capable of doing which shows in your behavior, your body language, how you speak, etc.
A Communications Center Specialist must be confident enough to inspire confidence in others while encouraging them to handle daily tasks and their personal lives with self-confidence that will, in turn, produce a well-rounded individual.
Evaluating Others:
Evaluating others is the capacity to see the individuality in others and recognize a person's unique point of view.
A Communications Center Specialist must master the skills of evaluating others to help his staff members to identify their talents and match those talents to the proper job without trying to judge them by their actions that can create a misinterpretation of who they are.
Personal Drive:
Personal Drive is a combination of desire and energy in its simplest form directed at achieving a goal in whatever you have set your heart to accomplish.
A Communications Center Specialist needs to creatively design ways that drive the staff to carry out their work without wasting time by helping them understand and develop their self-motivation skills that assist them to take control of many different viewpoints of their life.
Organizational Skills:
Organizational Skills is the ability to make use of time, energy and resources available in the most efficient manner to achieve their goal.
A Communications Center Specialist should organize the work for the employees to ensure overall organization, planning, time management, scheduling, coordinating resources and meeting deadlines is handled most efficiently by each employee for both personal and professional growth.
Quality of Work:
The quality of Work is the value of work or products produced by the employees as well as the work environment they are provided with.
A Communications Center Specialist needs creativity in assisting all teams in identifying characteristics that will result in a quality product and lead to greater efficiency and increased productivity by following the four critical outcomes of employee retention, customer satisfaction, profitability, and productivity.
Quantity of Work:
The quantity of Work is the amount of work accomplished by an employee against the expectations set by the employer.
A Communications Center Specialist should be keen to monitor an employee's job performance by comparing it to the standard work measurements that are often given at various intervals while evaluating the production to tell when to refresh a worker's skills or address any behavioral factors.
Hard Skills Required to be a Communications Center Specialist
Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.
Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.
A communications center specialist should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.