Episode #239: Why Engineers Need Presentation Skill Training

English versus mathematics? Easy choice for budding engineers at High School and for when they get to University. Science is logical, knowable, understandable. Presenting seems to have little in the way of science and more art involved, so best avoided. Actually they do a pretty good job of avoiding it, until a certain stage in their careers. These days clients want to talk to the engineers, so they have to front up and visit the buyer with the salesperson. If the counterparty is another engineer, then the code is in place and everyone is fine. Line managers, decision makers, CFOs are different beasts and more difficult. Even more annoying is the client conducts beauty parades to decide which company’s engineers they are going to select.

This is where the skilled engineer who can present in a skilled way eats everyone’s lunch. One engineer mumbles, rambles, doesn’t look confident and is struggling with basic coherence. The other is clear, concise, in command of the material and making the key points like a legend. Well, the choice for the buyer is made pretty easy.

In other cases, the engineers get promoted and have to represent their section to the senior leaders in the company. This is often when we get a call. “Can you help us please. We have a great engineer leading the team but his communication skills and presentation skills are dismal and the senior leadership have tasked HR to fix the problem, by finding a training company who can help”.

This sounds good but it is often a difficult task. The major issue tends to be a lack of awareness around the importance and value of presenting. These skills are soft skills rather than the hard skills, which their profession demands. They can see them as a bit “fluffy”. Presentation skills are very much in the eye of the beholder too, so opinions can vary regarding what is a good presentation. This lack of agreed, concrete measurable aspects can be an anathema to engineers.

Fluffy or otherwise, persuasion power is a real thing. This requires good skills in the design of the talk, the gathering of evidence and in the delivery. Design here means does the talk flow logically resulting in a clear conclusion, that is credible, because of the evidence assembled to support the main argument.

Ace engineer or not, if we start the presentation with a lot of fiddling around with the tech, there is a strong chance our audience is distracted and reaching for their phones to find something more interesting to do. We have to know that this is the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism and attention spans are functioning at microscopic levels. No matter how brilliant our evidence is, we will have lost many in our audience in those first few vital seconds, as we establish that first impression between speaker and listener. Online is even worse because now everyone is granted a free license to multi-task in the background and ignore the speaker.

Our opening has to be a gripper, such that the audience want to hear more, they want to know where you are going with this presentation. We must speak clearly and confidently. Easier said than done for laconic engineers, who are not prone to speaking a lot. Also, not doing a lot of presentations or probably, avoiding to do presentations, has left a confidence vacuum that is filled with nervousness. Sounding confident to an audience when you are not requires a level of thespian ability, which is usually beyond the grasp of hard skill trained engineers.

Rehearsal is the saviour here and lots of it is required. We don’t want to spend all of our time building the slide deck. The delivery is what sells the message and that relates straight back to the fact we have to buy what we are saying first and then communicate that belief to the audience. If we don’t understand the power of persuasion, we are likely to fluff off the rehearsal component of making the speech professional.

I have never been able to trace this supposed Japanese saying but it does sound good, “more sweat in training, less blood in battle”. Let’s make our mistakes in practice, get the talk timing right, work on the cadence, the order and the delivery. If we have the right mindset, then good things will happen and all of these other pieces of the puzzle will fit into place nicely.