Communication Effectiveness

As an engineer, cultivating soft skills to better increase communication between you and others is important for furthering your career and increasing your overall skills as an engineer. Being able to establish and create a working relationship with others is important, as is making yourself clear to the others. Not everything is about hard technical skills, and being able to get along with the people you work with can increase job satisfaction and productivity. 

When doing technical work for customers, not all customers understand the exact implementation or why of what you are doing. Being able to best explain your process and help them better understand the services you provide is important for creating customer satisfaction.

Speaking to the customer requires you to assess their technical level, and to create better communication by speaking at that level with them. This can mean explaining what each step means in simple terms or speaking at a higher level of abstraction. Using analogies to explain concepts is an easy way to catch people up to speed about different technologies and their uses. 

When asking or answering questions, try to make what you’re saying as clear as possible, so that no misunderstandings occur. When speaking to the customer, try to understand their underlying goal with the project, and use these goals to address how your solution will best meet that need. If a question is asked that you don’t know the answer to, note down that you will ask someone for them, or that you will get the answer to them later. 

For personal improvement, being able to properly execute what I want to say is something I need improvement. Being able to explain as much as possible that I know about the subject matter to the customer. I had issues in the last conversation with the customer because I wasn’t able to verbalize what I had to contribute to the conversation, and so I ended up not saying as much as I would have liked to. I plan on writing out more about what I can talk about during the meeting into a personal document before going into a customer meeting, to help establish talking points for myself. 

Small talk can be important to customers, so being able to enthusiastically engage in small talk will give you talking points with the customer. I am not the best at small talk, so cultivating this skill is important for not coming off as awkward if a customer or colleague wants to engage in small talk. 

• An engineer needs to cultivate soft skills to help better productivity with colleagues and within projects
• Being able to comprehend what is being asked for in a project as well as being able to establish communications with others.
• Speak to other on their technical levels, make sure that you are fitting the needs of the customer/others
• Actively listen, make sure that you are clearly understanding the problem and any associated issues
• Engage in small talk as an ice breaker and to better increase communication levels
• Speak with clarity, often clarify what you are trying to say if you feel like others are not understanding you
• Create talking points for yourself to make sure that you have something to talk about
• Actively work to solve issues, make sure that goals are being reached by what you are working on