Strategies, exercises, and documents to help technical people better interact with both peers and non-technical people
You, or your staff, are technical people, perhaps engineers. Me too! For the last 20 years, I’ve been a software engineer and architect with scores of employees and co-workers. What’s the one thing I wish all my co-workers and employees would learn next after getting to the base level to do the technical job? Another programming language? Publish a new research paper? Get another degree? No! After 2 decades of working with technical people, the thing I always care most about is how are their soft skills, specifically how are their communication skills!
What you’ll learn
- Skills and Techniques to communicate better with non-technical people.
- Learn ways to evaluate your audience so you can deliver the same content in an effective way.
- Skills for both verbal and written communication.
- Ways to evaluate cultural, technical, and perspective differences.
- The structure and format of various technical documents.
- How to use visuals effectively?.
Course Content
- Introduction –> 3 lectures • 30min.
- Audience Analysis –> 5 lectures • 24min.
- General Techniques, Strategies, & Exercises –> 8 lectures • 52min.
- Technical Documents and Writing –> 5 lectures • 49min.
Requirements
You, or your staff, are technical people, perhaps engineers. Me too! For the last 20 years, I’ve been a software engineer and architect with scores of employees and co-workers. What’s the one thing I wish all my co-workers and employees would learn next after getting to the base level to do the technical job? Another programming language? Publish a new research paper? Get another degree? No! After 2 decades of working with technical people, the thing I always care most about is how are their soft skills, specifically how are their communication skills!
I have worked with engineers who are “twice” the engineer of anyone else on my team. They prototyped quickly, they knew the answer to almost every problem, they could carry the heavy load… and yet I wanted them on another team, or I was thrilled to hear they were looking for another job. Why? They were difficult to work with which totally overshadowed their technical ability. They always came across as rude, ambiguous, or know-it-alls to both everyone their team and to management. On the other hand, I have worked with engineers who were just barely able to do their job, but we’re excellent communicators. I gladly committed to them, because I knew I could teach them the hard skills, their soft skills were there, and they make my life better, the team chemistry better, and the company better.
That’s what this course is about.
It comes in 2 primary parts:
Sections 1, 2, & 3 focus on the soft skills of communication. These are difficult to nail down for engineers! They focus on audience analysis and strategies a technical person can employ to improve. We spend this time primarily exploring conceptually and doing exercises.
Section 4 focuses on the hard skills of technical communication. How to write technical documents, focusing on reports, proposals, and memos, editing and proofreading, and using visuals effectively. This time is spent looking at structure and formatting.
When you (or your staff) are finished with the course, you will be better equipped to communicate with both non-technical staff and peers, as more human, more approachable, and more understandable. You will also have the tools to write well structured technical documents. Get started improving your soft engineering skills today!