Strategies for Delivering a Presentation to a Hostile Audience
As engineers we often get the opportunity to work on great projects. We often transform the landscape through construction and make life safer and more efficient for the people using our infrastructure. However, not everyone is going to see it that way. Many of us have had to deliver a presentation to a hostile audience […]
How to Handle Conflict Resolution Questions During Engineering Job Interviews
In any type of interview, but especially in engineering job interviews, hiring managers ask questions about how you would deal with technical conflict. They want to know about your interpersonal skills and how you would deal with a problem in the office if it should arise, especially if the conflict is of a technical […]
Developing a Plan B When Giving Engineering Presentations
The mutter of the crowd begins to subdue as the moderator asks people to settle into their seats for the next engineering presentation. After a brief intro, the presenter steps to the front of the room. After a smooth speech introduction, the speaker is just going to his first slide when the projector light […]
Why Communication for Engineers Is so Important
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 […]
Avoid Torturing Your Audience When Giving Presentations
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 […]
Actions Speak Louder than Words in Your 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 […]
How to Begin your Speech Planning and Design
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 […]
Expect Murphy’s Law to Apply to all Engineering Presentations You Give
I’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 […]
Don’t Ignore Opportunities to Celebrate Engineering
It 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 […]
5 Tips for Improving Internal 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, […]
