2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Abstract
While engineering schools have aspects of technical communication in their required coursework, most newly-hired engineers do not possess the communication skills to excel in industry. Making matters more complicated is the fact that many programs focus on teaching engineering fundamentals and leave “soft skills” to other departments. Given this environment, an approach tailored to engineering communication is needed to meet the unique requirements for engineers in industry.

The purpose of this paper is twofold:
1) examine various forms of communication engineers must possess and their importance, and 2) describe the design, implementation, and assessment of a new senior-year ECE course which is specifically aimed at developing the critical communication skills for engineers in industry.
For the first part we used a survey of managers and executives in a large high-tech company to determine the most important gaps. For the second part we use the following 5 lenses for technical communication:

Lens 1: Audience Type - Technical, Business, Customer
Lens 2: Audience Seniority - Entry, Mid-Level, Executive
Lens 3: Communication Form - Document, Verbal, Presentation
Lens 4: Purpose - Educate/Inform, Influence/Sell, Request a Decision
Lens 5: Length - 30 seconds, 3 minutes, 30 minutes

We start the course with the area engineers are most familiar with: Informing (lens 4) Entry level (lens 2) , Technical audiences (lens 1) in documents or presentations (lens 3) for 3 minutes (lens 5). We then build skills to make the transition to communicating and influencing business audiences. Lastly we make the most difficult transition to effectively influencing customers.

The course is delivered as though the students are engineers in industry and their assignments are based on common real-world communication tasks. They must summarize technical articles in short, written emails and present a short summary without notes (as though they were providing an update in a staff meeting). Critical to this course design is instructor/peer, real-time verbal feedback as well as video of all presentations for student self reflection. Longer form technical, executive and customer presentations are incorporated into the class with the students providing real-time feedback to their peers as though they were fellow employees in the company. Asking the students to provide positive and constructive feedback changes the dynamic of the audience from passive to active listeners and participants. Fun games are also used to introduce concepts such as analogies and illustrations to convey complex topics.

The effectiveness of our approach is confirmed by assessing the students’ assignment grades pre and post course which show significant improvement. Similarly, based on the student course evaluation data students rated highly the relevance and usefulness of this course. In the full paper we will provide full course implementation details and assessment data. We believe that with the skills they develop in this class, students will start their engineering careers well-prepared to progress upward professionally.

Preference is for a full conference session presentation.