CE News Recognizes Importance of Good Communication Skills

CE News Magazine has recognizes the important of good communication skills for civil engineers in their January 2011 issue of the magazine. Here is an excerpt of the Professional Practice column of the magazine, in an article entitled "Change is Good":

Strike one — Civil engineers are taught to be civil engineering professionals, not civil engineering businesspeople. The result: They know a lot about civil engineering and all too little about business in general and the professional service business in particular.

Strike two — Many civil engineers are ineffective communicators. Some, it seems, sense these deficits at an early age and find comfort in math and science, where a lack of expository skills doesn’t matter all that much; numbers do the talking.

Strike three — Many civil engineers have weak interpersonal skills, except when it comes to other civil engineers who want to talk about civil engineering. Regrettably, in the civil engineering business, most of the folks civil engineers deal with are businesspeople, administrators, “finance guys,” contractors (who may be graduate civil engineers but now live in a far different world), government officials, and so on. Those civil engineers who do not fit the stereotype — the gregarious extroverts — have a huge advantage over their less-outgoing brethren because the service business in general and the professional service business in particular are all about people.

Good communication skills obviously include writing well. Numbers can't always do the talking for surveyors and engineers, especially when dealing with members of the public and with clients. Numbers might make sense to us, but they need to be skillfully interpreted for others.

The Sunburned Surveyor