Quote:
Originally Posted by SaintessHeart
Not much other than the instructions of "behaviing properly" and "knowing what to do automatically when there are no customers around".
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Sounds more like a "We are too lazy to teach you what you need to know to do your job right, but don't want a high paying salesman who knows his stuff from decorating the shop to customer satisfaction analysis, but we have always been perfect in what we do, and what we do is the definition of common sense." argument.
Still, if you can ignore their rants try to adapt to their business model as fast as possible. You might learn a thing or two... Besides it is a good soft skill when you can gather knowledge in a very subtile way from people who are too much into their stuff to realize that what they do is not common sense or known to everyone but a lot of special knowledge and procedures that needs to be understood.
And by the way...
That skill is also a very important in (software) engineering/development. Because, if you do not understand the processes and the needs of the people you create your tool for (stakeholder analysis), your final tool will be something between a failure (worst case) or not optimal to use (best case) for the client it was developed for.
Now in most cases people tend not to waste their time explaining what they do and why they do it the way they do it. Sometimes they do not even see the processes as anything special anymore because it is daily routine and hence forget to tell you about it (yet it often is an important part of what they do).
So, part of the skill is to observe and to analyze processes (you have to actively spend time on that and quickly understand it). And to have the social skills to ask for the stuff that cannot be analyzed/observed that easily, but in a way that shows you are interested in the matter without annoying the person who is asked (not coming across as "know it all"... not interupting an explanation that drifts off a little bit... showing affinity as in proactively pursuing knowledge to understand the topic and become better in what you do for the benefit of the client/colleagues).