Communication Matters

I’ve long been convinced that communication skills are crucial for engineers. Actually, I think they are crucial for everyone, but their importance needs to be sold to us techies. We tend to focus on solving the problem rather than telling people what we have done and why it is a good idea. In my experience an engineer can make themselves around 10 times more useful simply by learning how to communicate properly.

And the critical message for an engineer is that presenting is a skill that can be learned. I used to tell students that they should approach being able to present well in the same way that they would learn a new programming language or application programmer interface (API). In other words, find out how to do it and then do it.

It’s lovely to see that other people take this seriously too. Clive Maxfield and Lucy Rogers have some great things to say about the importance of presentation and how to do it. Both are splendid folks who are well worth following.