Arguably, effective communication is as important to engineers as their technical abilities. And while we spend years at university and college learning the technical stuff, relatively little educational time is dedicated to developing our communication skills. Instead, this important area of development is left to on-the-job training.
Think Up’s Effective Communication for Engineers workshop is intended to help practising engineerings enhance and formalise the communication skills that they have developed in their everyday work. The aim of the workshop is to give engineers strategies to help them navigate their way through the sorts of tricky communication that arise in project work. The workshop is split into two parts delivered a week or so apart. In this first part, we introduce the idea of an engineer’s communication toolkit, a series of principles and approaches to apply when listening, working out what to say, communicating and following up. Between the two workshops we invite participants to put the toolkit into practice in their daily work. At the second workshop we then use the toolkit to tackle some case study examples.
As a result of attending this workshop, participants should be less inclined to put off the difficult conversations that they have been avoiding; and will have a mechanism for reducing stress by being able to more effectively negotiate for what they want or need.