Effective Ways to Improve Your Communication Skills as an Engineer
Many more technically minded people are not naturally adept at speaking in front of people or communication in general. Refining our communication skills as engineers takes work, so let’s take a look at some practical ways we can optimize our performance.
If you can get a conversation started off well, then the rest of the conversation is likely to go smoothly. This applies both to casual talks with your coworkers to presentations in front of potential clients.
Let’s focus on the latter first. For presentations, try practicing a solid introduction to who you are and what you do. Give the task some forethought and try out different types of introductions. If you practice anything, make sure your introduction comes off smooth and confident, but not rehearsed. We can call this introduction optimization rather than public speaking practice. I don’t know about you, but my engineering brain feels a lot better about something when it includes the word optimization rather than the dreadedpublic speaking.
Joking aside, practicing your introduction helps you in two ways. When it goes smoothly, you, as the presenter, feel more comfortable with the audience. When you present yourself as a skilled individual in a confident manner, it actually makes you seem more confident and skilled in the presentation. The second aspect is that a good introduction establishes respect from the audience to yourself. An audience that feels like they can relate to a presenter is much more likely to respond well to a presentation—or laugh at your terrible jokes.
For more personal conversations, the tactics are a little different. You probably don’t want to start off a water cooler chat with your coworker with the phrase, “Hi, I’m Bill, and I’m an expert engineer.” That would be awkward, and the goal of this blog post is to make you less awkward. When engaging in a more free-flowing conversation, it can be helpful to remind yourself to slow down, run some quality control on your words before they leave the factory. If you can seamlessly flow into a conversation, the rest of the discussion is going to go a lot better.
Tagging along to the last aspect of the previous point, a key to public speaking is to make sure your mouth doesn’t resemble the broken water main you just repaired last week. Put a flow valve on your mouth and limit what you’re saying to only the effective and well-communicated things.
As engineers, we have a lot of knowledge up in our heads. For most of the world, this knowledge means absolutely nothing. When going into meetings with clients or presenting to others, make sure you adapt your speaking to the audience you are presenting to.
