
Identify your audience to tailor technical communication for engineers and non-technical stakeholders. Practice writing emails and presentations, refine one-on-one verbal conversations, and apply feedback techniques through practical assignments.
Explore why effective technical communication reduces misunderstandings, anxiety, and bad products. Engage stakeholders to boost time efficiency, cost savings, client satisfaction, and team collaboration.
Navigate engineers' communication challenges, from jargon to translating abstract work into concrete, audience-friendly messages for diverse stakeholders, and learn concise, precise, and visual approaches as technology evolves.
Lead a hands-on audience analysis exercise by translating technical jargon into clear concepts, then rank stakeholder knowledge from one to three to improve engineering communication.
Practice engaging with people to improve technical communication and show you care about feedback, then learn how audience types—junior developers, DevOps, and non-technical stakeholders—shape your message.
Explore audience types engineers interact with, prioritize stakeholders, and learn to curate a flexible audience list—from peers and regulators to end users, investors, and operations—with a practical exercise.
Analyze audiences by sorting into buckets and use real-time and pre feedback to tailor explanations; seek champions, monitor body language, and simplify messages to maintain comprehension.
Tailor content to the audience to improve comprehension and project outcomes, build credibility, and stay relevant. Eliminate jargon to keep the audience engaged and understand where they are.
Explore strategies for effective technical communication, vary audiences, practice in an artificial environment, and define objectives and success to guide the handoff.
Define audience objectives and expectations early, refine goals to match their needs, and seek compromise to maintain credibility and adapt across presentations and lunch and learn sessions.
Meet the audience where they are by aligning goals, gathering feedback, and communicating at a realistic technical level to achieve better project outcomes.
Define assumptions and presuppositions in technical communication, explain how incompatible presuppositions and jargon-driven assumptions derail understanding, and outline steps to review emails for alignment and clarity.
Use analogies, metaphors, and illustrations to translate abstract technical concepts into concrete understanding, using the front-end browser and the back-end API as a restaurant analogy; tailor examples for diverse audiences.
Use storytelling to give the audience a concrete break from dense technical details, refreshing mental energy and improving peer-to-peer communication with brief, relevant, reality-based anecdotes.
Leverage empathy to understand how others feel and view their journey, prioritize their perspective, and tailor your communication by listening and letting them win.
Simplify or explain jargon by defining ten terms in clear English, then illustrate each for a non-technical audience and provide technical analogies.
We contrast personal, empathetic communication with rigorous technical writing, emphasizing structure, format, and style to ensure complete, understandable documents such as proposals, through templates, guidelines, and uniformity.
Define a technical document as a written communication that conveys technical information in a meaningful and concise way, enabling knowledge transfer, decision making, paper trail, and legal and regulatory compliance.
Explore the types of technical documents engineers use to transfer knowledge, including reports, memos, proposals, user guides, manuals, and specifications.
Learn how to craft concise, audience-focused technical reports with structured sections—the title page, abstract, executive summary, methods, results, discussion, conclusions, and effective visuals.
learn how to craft a complete, persuasive technical proposal by detailing structure, executive summary, problem statements, scope, timeline, budget, risks, and client-facing presentation.
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!