5 Ways You Benefit from Advanced Vocabulary in Your Work Life

When you’re sitting for your SATs, or trying to spice up your college essays, you might think that learning vocabulary is an activity you can put behind you when you graduate.

But the truth is, advanced vocabulary is a necessary soft skill that can significantly change your life – including your career – for the better.

With a thorough and developing word bank, you arm yourself with one of the most versatile soft skills.

Not only does learning advanced vocabulary boost the appeal of your skillset to employers, but also gives you an advantage in a constantly evolving workforce.

And the best part is, with modern education technology, learning advanced vocabulary isn’t just easy, but also fun.

Vocabulary software like Vocabulary Quest create a video game-like environment where you proceed through quests and unlock achievements and equipment by recalling advanced vocabulary words.

The game is formatted to use brain-friendly methods to maximize the efficiency of your learning, while keeping you motivated and immersed with engaging in-game features and story.

With the tools at your disposal, let’s take a look at the 5 ways you benefit from advanced vocabulary in your work life.

5 Ways You Benefit from Advanced Vocabulary in Your Work Life

1. You Communicate Effectively Through Writing

The level of connectivity within the 21^st century is unprecedented, and a lot of the communication that drives the modern-day workforce is in writing.

Whether you are writing detailed work reports and proposals, answering emails or maintaining a social media account for your company, your writing skills can make all the difference in your career success.

According to Forbes, written communication is one of the most important soft skills employers seek out, that can distinguish you from your peers.

Everyone can write, but a strong grasp of advanced vocabulary gives you a much more versatile set of tools to express yourself with as efficiently and effectively as you can.

Rather than generic, run-of-the mill text, advanced vocabulary allows you to be far more specific about your ideas, to communicate specific tone and intent through your writing, and engage your audience.

For example, how would you write a proposal to a new, important client your company is hoping to strike up a partnership with?

How would you want to represent your brand to a young demographic of customers on your social media, compared to older customers?

If you had to write emails to diffuse a tricky work dispute, what would be the best way to both address the problem and propose solutions, without ruffling any more feathers?

With a limited bank of words, your expression in writing, where all other non-verbal cues like body language and tone of voice are missing, you might not be able to communicate as effectively as you’d like.

With advanced vocabulary, though, not only are you able to be more precise with what you want to say, you can also modify how you get your message across depending on the purpose and audience.

You are also better able to allow your personality, thoughts, opinions and ideas to stand out in your writing.

These are intangible but invaluable skills to have in the present-day workforce, and sure to make you not only an effective member of your team, but also set you on the fast-track to career advancement.

2. You are Qualified for Some of the Highest Paying Careers

Did you know that many high paying professions absolutely require strong reading comprehension as a necessary skill?

Reading comprehension, simply put, refers to your ability to decode, process and understand text, and assimilate it into your existing knowledge.

For certain career paths, needing an advanced vocabulary is inevitable.

Technical fields like law, chemical or aeronautical engineering, microbiology, to name just a handful, have their own specific and advanced terminology that you would need to incorporate into your daily vocabulary to do your job effectively.

Philosophy, literature, journalism, and many other disciplines require strong reading comprehension and fluency not only to process information about also to express ideas formed through them effectively.

Strong reading comprehension skills are a must for many fields, since you will need to quickly and efficiently absorb a lot of information, integrate it with what you already know, and apply this knowledge to address problems and provide solutions within your job scope.

And by possessing such strong reading comprehension skills, with a sound ability to retain, recall and apply advanced vocabulary, you open up opportunities to qualify for a range of high paying careers, from education administrators to intelligence analysts, psychologists and geneticists, and so much more.

3. You Learn to Adapt to a Changing Workplace

Constantly learning advanced vocabulary builds and demonstrates your ability to adapt to new information and changing circumstances.

This is an invaluable trait in the 21^st century workforce.

LinkedIn lists adaptability as one of its top 5 most in-demand soft skills of 2020, while learnability is considered the number one most important soft skill overall by Forbes.

The benefits in terms of adaptability with advanced vocabulary are multi-layered.

For starters, if you are learning advanced vocabulary through vocabulary software primed to help you learn in a brain-friendly way, you grow much more efficient in the way you absorb new vocabulary.

For instance, Vocabulary Quest uses a video game format to test you on advanced vocabulary at specific intervals, using spaced repetition and review to make sure it strengthens your memory of it.

The brain learns and stores information by creating connections between its cells or neurons.

Every time Vocabulary Quest re-introduces you to a word or poses a task where you have to recall it, the process of review and retrieval activates these neural pathways.

The more active these pathways, the stronger your memory of this information grows – a neuroscience-proven method of optimizing how your brain learns best!

Not only does this gradually build up your advanced vocabulary in a fun and engaging way, it also primes your brain for new learning.

Thanks to something called neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to learn and re-learn at all ages – keeping your brain active and growing through all this brain-friendly neural activity makes it sharper, faster, and healthier.

In other words, your brain is cognitively processing and assimilating information faster, which is a must when you need to adapt to changing work circumstances on the fly.

Being able to integrate new information like advanced vocabulary into your knowledge bank not only proves to you that you have the potential to constantly learn and adapt to new information but gives you the tools to do just that too.

After all, this advanced vocabulary also helps you improve your reading comprehension and boost the efficiency and speed with which you can process and absorb new, complex and technical information!

4. You are Better Able to Collaborate

Collaboration is another frequently recurring soft skill ranking high in the list of soft skills in the most demand in the modern-day workforce.

As more and more companies and employers highlight the importance of interpersonal relations and teamwork to accomplish common goals, you not only have to work effectively independently, but also as part of a team.

And when collaborating with others to accomplish a mutual goal, communication – not only expressing your ideas but listening to others, opening yourself up to a variety of perspectives, working with your team to come up with joint solutions – is extremely important.

Once again, advanced vocabulary gives you the tools to do this.

When communicating face to face or through written options like email, possessing the right words for the right time can make all the difference in helping collaborative work processes run smoothly.

Not only are you better able to get your own ideas across and express yourself in the most effective way to your peers, you are also better able to receive and cognitively process their ideas.

Possessing an advanced vocabulary also allows you to then effectively assimilate all these diverse ideas into a single, uniform course of action which you can communicate efficiently to everyone involved.

And having the right words and expressions allows you to communicate not only your ideas but also your intent.

You’re able to express your receptiveness to others’ opinions, encourage and appreciate their thoughts, respectfully critique or receive critique, and so on, in a mutually inclusive and beneficial way.

5. You Can Exercise Your Creativity

The more advanced vocabulary you possess, the better equipped you are to express specific, detailed, and nuanced ideas.

Moreover, the more advanced vocabulary you possess, the better you are able to learn and retain new, complex information and create associations with your existing knowledge.

This gives you the resources you need to generate creative and original ideas and problem-solving.

Learning new information and being able to process and make sense of complex ideas in turn gives you the fuel you need to create your own fresh ideas.

And fresh ideas are in high demand in today’s rapidly evolving workplace.

In fact, creativity is another consistently highly ranked soft skill coveted by employers today.

If you lack the terminology to understand, think about, and engage with your field of expertise meaningfully and in-depth, you’re effectively limited in your opportunities.

But consistently polishing up your advanced vocabulary can create a ripple effect of levelling up your skillset across the board – and greatly improving your career trajectory!

So, has this article convinced you about all the career enhancing benefits of learning advanced vocabulary?

Let me know in the comments below!

Jason Manilla is the Founder and owner of VocabularyQuest.com.