Engineers often beat themselves up about the overly technical presentations they have to give, assuming, maybe, that it is not a skill that comes naturally to them. But is this true? Is there something fundamental to the logical engineering mind that is at odds with engaging oral presentation?

Over the past 15 years as a lecturer in communications at UCD, a consultant in the private sector, and an engineer myself, I have been given a unique vantage point to answer this question. And my findings might surprise you. In my opinion, engineers are uniquely suited to making presentations.

Engineers' two key strengths when presenting

Why do I say this? There are two reasons, namely: engineers have a strong visual sense and a logical top-down approach to completing tasks.

Looking at visuals, first, it is interesting to reflect how often engineers turn numbers and ideas into visuals. Graphs, charts, construction plans, circuit diagrams, mimics, blueprints, sections, exploded views, part drawings, GUIs, SOPs and PFDs are just some of the visual forms that, as engineers, we engage with daily.

We are schooled in the art of communicating visually, and you can see this visual instinct come to the fore in the presentation slides that engineers create when encouraged to do so.

Figure 1 shows a slide from an engineering presentation on renewable energy which shows the energy breakdown of the EU electricity market in 2011. Because it is a 10 x 10 grid of icons, it shows, in a visually intuitive way, the percentage share of each energy source.

Engages audience visually

A slide like this engages the audience visually and frees the presenter to do the talking – no need for bullet points – together with that hand gestures, eye contact, vocal inflection and emotion that go with this talking.

If you look at some more slides from the same presentation – Figure 2 – you can see a mix of visuals: diagrams, charts, maps, images. What I have noticed about engineers is they don’t just use visuals as a communication tool – as in the infographic in Figure 1 – but they think visually throughout.

Figure 3 shows a set of slides from a presentation on tower cranes and again you can see the mix of visuals forms. What you cannot, however, is that the first, third and fifth slides are videos, which add another layer to the visual communication.

Video opportunities

There are billions of videos available online and presenters often shun this resource, favouring instead static – utterly flaccid – bullet points. 

Coupled with this, everyone has a video camera in their back pocket which can be used for taking footage from site visits, and CAD and other solid modelling packages allow yet more video opportunities. Engineers, when emboldened to do so, are good at finding ways to use these visual tools effectively and engagingly in their talks.

A further visual tool was employed in the presentation – also given by engineers – shown in Figure 4, namely animations. In this presentation on photography, slides 3 and 5 contained simple, intuitively coloured schematics which were animated to show the internal workings of an SLR camera. In addition, as befits a presentation on photography, the visuals were elegant and clear throughout; engineers often have a good eye.

The second reason engineers are naturally good at making presentations is that they have a structured, logical approach to carrying out task. For the audience, an oral presentation is a live, transient, fleeting communication in which it is all too easy to get lost.

So as the presenter, you have to be really clear on where you are going and why. Engineers tend to be good at this. Although the ideas within the presentation may be complicated, it is vital that the structure that holds these ideas together is simple: problem-solution; advantages-disadvantages, timeline, etc, and engineers think this way naturally.

Communication is not an exact science, but the more exact you are about the audience, aim and outcomes of a task, the more chance you have of being successful. Engineers generally have a practical sense of purpose that serves them well when creating a structured communication.

So why aren’t all engineering presentations fascinating?

Tricky art of presenting

Given how suited I have said that engineers are to the tricky art of presenting, why aren’t all engineering presentations spellbinding? Indeed – you may ask facetiously – why aren’t any of them?

What I have observed is that presenters often adopt a style based on the perceived preferences of the audience. For example, students who give excellent presentations on my own course – and they genuinely do – will often present differently in front of their supervisors.

They will opt for a more ‘formal’, ‘technical’ or ‘bullet-point’ driven presentation because they believe that that’s what their supervisor wants, or simply because that’s what everyone else is doing.

Gone will be the images, videos, animations, demonstrations, stories, examples and analogies that made the talk interesting, and in its place will be content that is safe, abstract and ultimately ineffective.

Likewise, in the workplace, bosses will often tell employees to pile content onto slides in the belief that simple, clear visual aids – like those shown above – are not ‘technical’ enough for a proper presentation.

In doing so, they are failing to appreciate that the audience, hearing the material for the first time, must be able to digest each idea fully if they are stay with the presentation. Visually showing ideas one at a time as you speak, is the best way to achieve this.

Trial presentation for your boss

In fact, doing a trial presentation for your boss, or even just showing him or her your slides in advance, is an inversion of how a presentation should work in that you are presenting to someone who probably knows more than you do about the topic, not less, and certainly not less than the target audience. Feedback of this sort does more harm than good and is part of the reason why engineering presentations fail.

The good news, though, is that as engineers you are more suited to this form of communication – big-picture, concise, logical, visual – than most professionals. Trust these engineering instincts and they will serve you and your audiences well.

Want to learn more about how to deliver technical presentations? Barry Brophy has developed a new, two-day CPD training course taking place on Thursday, March 12, and Friday, March 13, in the Sandymount hotel.

For more information or to book a place, please contact the CPD Training Team via cpdtraining@engineersireland.ie / 01 665 1305.