Engineer: Why and how should the engineer communicate their work?

In retrospect, the job of an engineer is more than just building good solutions to identified problems; engineers need to also take on the role of the sleek salesperson in a situation that calls for it. One of the “secret sauce” that gets the stakeholder buy-ins or the solution out there in the market, relies on the engineers’ ability to arouse interests in the stakeholders, which very much requires the ability to connect with them.

As far as I can remember, as a detailed-oriented person, the way I share the projects I have done is by providing step-by-step details, guiding the person through the process before arriving at the overall solution. Essentially, in school, whenever we give a presentation on an engineering based project, a detailed methodology that shows the rigour of the solution is typically expected. Yet, the same style of presentation, placed in the context of an industrial setting could become ineffective. This occurred to me when our team was preparing for our presentation for the plant director during our PepsiCo project, and one of the feedback we got was to focus more on the cost saving.

Reading material for Writing and Critical Thinking Class Civic Discourse in a Fractious World (UWC2101B). One of the key thing in this passage is the idea that both the speaker’s speech and the audience’s interpretation is based on presuppositions. (Scanned text unable to be annotated).

The first thing that came to my mind was my Writing and Critical Thinking Class Civic Discourse in a Fractious World (UWC2101B) taught by Professor Mark Brantner. In the course, Professor Mark Brantner taught us two important concepts known as the “Kairos—in a particular sense means a moment in time, or the opportune time—and the idea of rhetorical situatedness, which could be understood as the situation that necessitates the communication between the speaker and the audience. Through the class, I found that in a rhetorical situation (or communication), an effective speech is about using the right form of appeal through words that can carry the specific intentions of the speaker towards the specific audience.

Applying the concepts in a generic sense (without delving into the concepts of ethos, logos, and pathos as a form of appeal), to the plant director who is the overall head of PepsiCo manufacturing plant in Singapore, his priority would be driving business top or bottom line. For some of his profile, the step-by-step procedures in how we arrive at the results have little value as the presupposition is that we have done all the due diligence, and that only the cost-savings would have a direct impact on his business. On the other hand, an academic institution such as NUS is more concerned about imparting knowledge. The rhetorical situatedness of the presentation to NUS requires us to show how we have used the concepts we have learnt in delivering our project. Hence, for the same HVAC optimisation project we had done, we had to prepare two different presentation slides, each catering to the specific requirement that fits the Kairos and rhetorical situatedness of the presentation.

Mechanical Systems Design (ME3103) project presentation slide prepared for NUS, focusing more on the theoretical aspect behind the optimisation process.

Along the same thread, the ever-changing needs and requirement of the employer and future client necessitate that we, traditionally trained engineers, stay abreast of new technological trend and development. At the same time, I have learnt to evoke that spirit of entrepreneurship to redefine and imagine a new and more meaningful solution for the engineering problems around me. More importantly, in the course of my work as future engineers, I also recognise the importance of weighing what I do against the notion of virtue and ethics, juxtaposing that against the business need of the company or client in establishing new value.