audience

TCEP 117: The Importance of Staying Calm, Cool, and Collected as a Civil Engineering Professional

May 8, 2019 By EMI

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In episode 117 of The Civil Engineering Podcast, I visit with Tracy Bratton, PE. who is the Land Development Division Manager at Doucet & Associates, based in Austin Texas. We talk about the importance of staying calm, cool, and collected as a civil engineering professional. We also talk about the role that sound technical experience plays in an engineer’s confidence level as well as the ability to manage projects.

Engineering Quotes:

Here Are Some of the Questions I Ask Tracy:

Tell us about your career journey.
Tell us about the time you spend in Venezuela.
When you started working in Land Development, was it something that you initially liked doing?
Talk about the importance of having sound technical knowledge in your field in order to become a successful manager.
What are some of the things you learned about managing teams in different locations?

Here Are Some Key Points Discussed in This Episode About Staying Calm, Cool, and Collected as a Civil Engineering Professional:

Strategies for Delivering a Presentation to a Hostile Audience

August 14, 2018 By EMI

Strategies for Delivering a Presentation to a Hostile Audience is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.

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 that does not think a certain project is the best idea. They come to the meeting with a preconceived notion of the project, not happy at the thought of what is proposed to be built.

If you are already a less than confident public speaker, speaking to this type of audience can be one of the hardest things to accomplish. They tend not to share your viewpoint, may have a dislike for technical answers, and may not value engineering expertise. Speaking to this type of crowd is never going to be easy, but there are a few things you can do to get ready.

Avoid Torturing Your Audience When Giving Presentations

May 30, 2018 By EMI

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

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.

Actions Speak Louder than Words in Your Presentation

April 18, 2018 By EMI

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

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.