"Communication skills" should be thought of as two separate sets of skills
I think “communication skills” should really be thought of as two separate sets of skills.
There are the “hard” communication skills, which are easily visible and which I’m going to call “expository communication skills”. These are things like being articulate, being able to write coherently, being good at public speaking, etc.
Then there are the “soft” communication skills, which I’m going to call “collaboration skills”, which are all about having the ability to understand and influence and compromise and work with other people. These are largely invisible.
In my opinion, collaboration skills are extremely important for everyone. Expository communication skills, on the other hand, are overrated and borderline useless for the vast majority of people.
The problem is that collaboration skills are hard to measure, SO we use expository communication skills as a proxy for them. This leads to a lot of people conflating the two sets of skills and thinking they come together (they don’t).
I mean, being good at public speaking is impressive, but it’s only useful if people actually listen to you long enough to learn something, which is unlikely because they’re too busy looking at their phones.