Featured Guest Blogger: Susan de la Vergne

Life is too short to sit through one more boring technical presentation in your engineering career.  Yet there you go, off to another one.

Technical Presenters

It’s a design review or project update, a test planning meeting or a problem solving session, and you know what you’re in for:  an hour in a dimly lit room, staring at projected bullet lists of talking points as well as the occasional “eye chart,” all the while listening to a sincere presenter cram as much information as possible into the little time he or she has.

There’s a perfectly understandable reason we find ourselves, more often than not, at boring technical presentations, and it is this: engineers and technical professionals are subject matter experts in their fields, but not, alas, expert presenters or public speakers.  They know their material, often at a very detailed level, and they’re pressed for time, eager to compress as much knowledge into as little time and space as possible in the name of efficiency.  They value content over form, prefer certainty over uncertainty, and determinism over ambiguity. 

These characteristics make them successful engineers, but being a good presenter calls on a different set of abilities—the ability, for example, to detect confusion in the audience and make adjustments on the fly, or the ability to manage a heated discussion when it erupts. 

What skills help you to do these things? [Read more...]