Hi, I'm Sarah and I'm Helen and you're listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast. This episode is part of our Skills Sprint series. We've recorded 20 episodes each less than seven minutes long that we hope we're going to help you to build some career development momentum. In every episode we talk about a squiggly skill, what it is and why it matters, share an idea for action each and give you a go-to guru and a podcast episode so you can learn more.

And we want you to turn your skills sprint into a learning streak.

And so for everyone who completes a 20-day learning street, we'll be offering you a free five skills to succeed in a squiggly Career virtual workshop in September. If you post about your progress on social and taggers

at Amazing If and we'll be in touch to tell you more. The skill for this sprint is all about

conversations at work and you might be thinking, well I talk to people all the time. Why don't

I just focus on this skill? But what we find is that a lot of the conversations that we're having at work have become

quite transactional, very much about getting the work done.

Whereas actually, when we develop conversations as a skill, we are going beyond the day job.

We're understanding different people's perspectives.

We're getting insights into their experience and their emotions maybe.

And that means that we are learning more about the individual, about the work that they're doing.

And we're also much more likely to pull possibilities towards each other.

Because when we have better conversations at work, we create better connections at work.

And that's what makes a really big difference

for our development. And we definitely see that people's circles of conversations have got smaller

as a result of the pandemic. And that sort of transactional element has definitely become more of an

issue for people in the way that we're working now. So the more we can develop the skill,

the more we can counteract that and the more it supports our career development. So Sarah, from your perspective, do you think

it's any different post-pandemic, the kind of the quality of the conversations you're having

with people? I think I had to re-find a way of having conversations beyond the day job. I think my

conversations got much more transactional as I started working more virtually. And I did miss,

you know, the in between very informal conversations you did have in an office. I love working

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