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Why Communication for Engineers Is so Important

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Why Communication for Engineers Is so Important is a
guest blog by Thomas A. Anderson, P.E:

Communication for Engineers

Do you remember the telephone game?

In school, you and your classmates tried to pick a phrase and “pass it on” by whispering it to the person next to you. Then the phrase was passed from person to person until the last person announced the phrase. How much did the phrase change during the game? As people relay message from one person to the other, the message will often be distorted.

While the game is a lot of fun. It also teaches us important lessons.

  • If you do not receive information from a reliable source, you may not get the correct information. It turns into gossip.
  • If you do not produce information properly, it will not be received as planned

Communication skills are vital to success in your personal life and your engineering career. Poorly delivered messages can turn into misunderstanding, frustration, or even a disaster.

By practicing communication, you will understand more of what people say. Your family, friends, and co-workers will have the confidence to come to you when they find themselves in need.

What are the keys to clear communication?

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Avoid Torturing Your Audience When Giving Presentations

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Avoid Torturing Your Audience When Giving Presentations is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.
Torturing Your Audience

We all know it. We all hate it. Yet, all of us do it at least once in a lifetime. How often have we suffered through a presentation where the slides, usually crammed full of information, were simply read to the audience? It’s not really a presentation so much as a live reading of a document meant to torture audience — or at least it seems that way. The presenter has stuffed as much information as they can onto a slide – a bad practice to begin with – then they read those overcrowded slides to an audience. Those presentations don’t work for three reasons.

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Actions Speak Louder than Words in Your Presentation

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Actions Speak Louder than Words in Your Presentation is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.

Presentation
Most engineers, and most people, will tell you that giving a presentation is not something they look forward to.  However, given our love of efficiency, engineers should have a different outlook.  One reason we give a speech to an audience is because it should be the most efficient way to share information.  The presenter has information they need to disseminate to a lot of people, so why not get them all in a room and tell everyone at the same time?  Doing so might even generate questions that you can answer for the group that wouldn’t come up if there wasn’t a group of people in that room.

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How to Begin your Speech Planning and Design

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How to begin your speech planning and design is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.Speech Planning

A long time ago in a conference room far, far away, speakers used to give their presentations using a slide projector.  Before computers were easy to move around, the slide projector was the all-in-one machine used to put graphics on the screen during a presentation.  You may have heard of the Kodak Slide Carousel.  You may have even used one in a presentation or two.  To use the carousel, the graphics the speaker wanted to show during the presentation were made into slides.  Those slides were loaded into a wheel and as the wheel advanced, a new slide was projected on the screen.

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Expect Murphy’s Law to Apply to all Engineering Presentations You Give

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Expect Murphy’s Law to Apply to all Engineering Presentations You Give is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.

Engineering PresentationsI’ve had the honor of speaking to thousands of engineers across the world over the years, which has helped me to understand why public speaking is so important to any professional.  It gives you the ability to reach and impact a lot of people.

That being said, there’s been a few times, where I showed up to speak and everything went wrong, and I had to adjust.  This happens more often than not and that’s why I am really excited to share the following story with you from our guest author for this week Shoots Veis, P.E, author of Public Speaking for Engineers, about engineering presentations. Enjoy it…

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Don’t Ignore Opportunities to Celebrate Engineering

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Don’t Ignore Opportunities to Celebrate Engineering is a guest post by
Shoots Veis, P.E.

Ignore OpportunitiesIt was Engineers Week and I attended a nice banquet to celebrate.  The evening commenced with drinks and socializing among local engineers and their guests, followed by a decent dinner.  The program began mid-meal, with the emcees telling jokes and getting the proceedings underway.  First up, scholarships were given to local high school seniors intending to study engineering.  The outreach events from the past year were then highlighted and a new batch of Professional Engineers were given plaques after reciting the Engineers’ Creed.  A heartfelt moment was shared when a new member of the Engineering Hall of Fame was introduced and reflected on his career.

The evening went along fruitfully until the Project of the Year awards.  All the goodwill and energy in the room built up over the evening was quickly drained from the room with back-to-back dreadful speeches by engineers receiving Project of the Year awards.  It was like an iron curtain dropped to halt all of the evening’s enjoyment.  The first engineer/speaker received the small project award. He was unprepared to speak about the project, rambled off subject, and could not make himself heard. It was dreadful.

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5 Tips for Improving Internal Team Communication

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Team Communication
Project managers spend the vast majority of their time communicating with others.  Depending on the source you reference, the figure can go as high as 80 percent of one’s time is tied-up in some type of communication.  A good amount of this time is spent in external communication: the client, the architect, the design team, regulatory officials, vendors, and others.  That’s a lot of stakeholders, however, the majority of the time you will invest elsewhere – in team communication.  How you approach team communication is by far the most important thing you will do as a project manager.

Effective Team Communication Enables Successful Projects

Think about the teams you’ve served on thus far in your personal or professional time. Some were successful, others not so much. If you spend time considering why success was achieved in certain teams over others, I suspect you’ll find team communication played a role.

Over my career, I’ve served on many teams.  Those teams that achieved the best successes by and far enjoyed stronger team communication.  The team leader set expectations, maintained open and transparent lines of communication, and encouraged the same across the team.  They also were proponents of the Rule of Three C’s – communicate, communicate, communicate.

I attribute the rule to an Air Force Chief I worked with when I was junior captain many years ago.  A week didn’t go by where I didn’t hear “captain if you want to be more effective in getting everyone on board you need to communicate, communicate, communicate!”.  He was on to something – the teams he led were always the best in the squadron and more often than not, the best on the base.

The take away is that effective team communication enables successful projects.  If you foster an environment of open and transparent communication with your team, you also are providing an environment that will enhance the likelihood of project success.  Without effective team communication, you greatly reduce the likelihood of project success.

Team Communication

How to Enhance Team Communication

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The Best Ways to Find Public Speaking Opportunities Around You

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Public Speaking Opportunities is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.

Public Speaking OpportunitiesTo get better at public speaking, you need to practice public speaking.  It may not seem like it, but there are many public speaking opportunities out there.  When you are not a seasoned public speaker, you should be looking for any chance to get out there and deliver a speech.  Ask the people you work with about public speaking opportunities available to employees.  Many companies encourage their employees to join Toastmasters and will provide the resources needed to participate. 

Public Speaking Opportunities
Here are some public speaking opportunities for you to consider:

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Speech Preparation: Preparing and Not Preparing for Presentations

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Speech Preparation is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.

Speech Preparation

I’m always excited when I get to deliver a speech, so I sent in an application to speak at a conference of operators on one of my favorite subjects.  I had spent two months with speech preparation and would be able to deliver it a couple of times for practice, between the acceptance at the conference and the day I would speak.  My proposal was accepted and I celebrate each time I get to convey the message, because I want my audience to walk away with a heightened appreciation for infrastructure.

Developing the presentation was not a burden because I believe in the issue and expended the effort necessary to develop a good speech.  I focused on defining the scope and objectives to fit them into a 30 to 45-minute time frame.  I found just the right story to open the speech and used graphical slides to reinforce each point.  I practiced several times before my first delivery and made small adjustments to the presentation after each delivery.  I have given the speech many times and it has never failed to be a hit.

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Five Benefits of Public Speaking

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Five Benefits of Public Speaking is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.

Five Benefits of Public Speaking

Engineering is a tough job that is dedicated to completing complicated designs that solve complex problems. Solving those problems is not up to the engineer alone, but requires a team effort of partners to secure financing, address the social and environmental impacts, determine the best design options and construction techniques and tackle a host of issues that arise during a project. That means engineers must communicate with others to get their work done and sometimes that means giving a speech to an audience who needs to know what you know. One of the benefits of public speaking related to standing in front of an audience is that it lets your team’s engineering design (and you) stand out in a world that is crowded with experts.

Benefits of Public Speaking tweet

Here are five specific benefits of public speaking for engineering professionals:

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