Soft Skills: The Go-to Tool in Your Troubleshooting Toolbox

What are soft skills? Well simply put, it's your "people skills". More precisely, it's your ability to communicate something clearly, your ability to listen, to really understand what the other person is saying. It's how well you're able to work with your colleagues. It's making the patient feel important because you took 5 minutes to listen to them and talk to them while you check to make sure that IV pump is working correctly, when, all day, nurses and doctors have been coming and going from the patient's room. I could go on, but these pretty well touch some of the important points of soft skills.

The career of a biomed can be very alluring to people who are introverted by nature because it's very much possible for them to spend a majority of their time in the workshop fixing machines or performing preventative maintenance (PMs). However, I think you're really missing out on an opportunity to become a great biomed by sitting at the bench all day and just fixing machines.

You should be annoying. I don't mean to be annoying in a troublesome or upsetting manner, I mean strike up conversations with strangers and coworkers as much as you can and ask as many questions, to the point where you begin to think to yourself, "Am I annoying people by talking to much?". The reason is quite simple really, a lot of people also enjoy talking, and by asking questions you can learn a lot. I remember one time when I was younger and working in a coffee shop, an older woman, probably in her late 40s, began asking me questions about myself; how did i like working there, what was i planning on studying, did i have any hobbies, etc. After that conversation ended I distinctly remember saying to myself, "I really enjoyed that conversation." and then immediately realizing right afterwards "Wait a minute, I don't know anything about that woman, I was so busy talking about myself, I didn't even ask her a question about herself." 

Ask questions, use that as a method to collect as much information about something as possible. As an example, say a nurse stops you in the hallway and asks you to take a look at an ECG that isn't working, you shouldn't just simply grab it and take it back to the workshop; take five minutes to ask her some questions about it, how did it stop working? Can you show me what you were doing when it stopped working? That five minute interaction might just reveal to you that she accidentally yanked the plug in such a way that it disconnected wiring from the prongs, and voila, you just saved yourself some time from hunting for a problem and earned yourself a 15-minute coffee break. Asking questions can help you gather information you might otherwise have not had and simplify a troubleshooting process.

I used to have a very unique job which I quite enjoyed, I was an actor at a police academy (policing students do scenario training, and they need actors too don't they?) and I would partake in all sorts of scenarios from drunken misconduct to traffic violation. I worked closely with veteran police officers who were there as instructors for those scenarios and I had the opportunity to stay for the debrief the instructor would do with the students after the scenario was complete. I remember something one of those instructors said to their students that always stuck with me. She said "You know, you have a belt at your hip with all sorts of tools, a baton, pepper spray, a handgun. You can choose to walk into a call with the intention of wrestling someone to the ground and cuffing them. You're going to find doing that for 30 years will make this career very long, alternatively you can use your words and communicate with the person in question to see if there's anything you can do help them as well as facilitate your job at the same time, so that everyone can go home safely at the end of the day. Truthfully 99% of the calls you take can be resolved by asking the right questions, which can often help you find the right way to help the person in need."

I think what that instructor said can apply to biomeds too. You can choose to troubleshoot the machine with a superficial level of information, or you can try to gather information upfront - you'll make it easier to fix the machine, and make positive impressions with patients and staff. Why would I work harder when I can work smarter?

The best time to put this into practice is right now, while you're in school. Learn and improve upon your soft skills as soon as you can. Even if you're working in the field already, now is better than later. It's like a cheat code for dealing with people, having great people skills can facilitate your job as a biomed, people like to talk, you can learn a lot from talking to people things you may have never learned otherwise.

BMET have their own toolbelt, they have fancy meters, screwdrivers and service manuals. You can opt to walk into repair calls and not make eye contact with the clinicians or the patients if you want, fixing the problem and walk back into your workshop, but I think you'll find the next 30 years to be quite long if you approach it that way. You could instead choose to use your soft skills to communicate with the nurses, doctors and other techs who rely on that equipment to save patient lives. You can use those people skills to make the nurse that you see everyday at work, feel heard in their thankless job. You can take the 5 extra minutes to simply talk to them during the repair to make them feel important. As a biomed, that is just as important as your meters and screwdrivers, its what separates a good biomed from a great biomed.