Christine G. Nicometo

Understanding engineering work and identity: a cross-case analysis of engineers within six firms

To better equip engineers to enter a dynamic technological and economic environment, educators must improve their understanding of the wide-ranging work of engineers and the flexible skills it demands. To that end, we studied engineering practice in six firms of varying size and industry. We analyzed the similarities and differences of engineering practice across these sites, and gathered narrative examples of what it means to be an engineer at these locations. Our data indicates more similarities across sites than differences. Although workplace cultures differed, most engineers saw their work similarly. They saw their work as problem solving, almost always done in explicitly organized teams or in informal collaboration with others. Engineers cited clear communication as the most important skill, with budgets and time limitations generally noted as the most significant constraints. Engineers generally valued solving a problem, learning, and working in a team more than other aspects of their jobs. This understanding of engineering work can be used to better equip engineers for the workforce and improve organizational practices.

Power presenting for cognitive retention and organizational longevity

We discuss much-tested, stronger techniques for engineers, instructors, trainers, and technical experts who use presentation slides as part of their work output. We draw from 1) practicing engineers who participated in interviews for a three-year NSF sponsored study on how people learn engineering (n=56); 2) practicing engineers enrolled in two online, graduate, professional engineering programs (n=60+); and 3) the work of experts including cognitive psychologists and visual rhetoric experts that has focused on the slide format in professional settings. Based on research from several fields, these techniques have worked well on several fronts for our practicing engineers; techniques include malleable methods of deploying sentence headers, rhetorical visuals, information layers, and archival organizational notes, amongst others. When practiced in a workplace setting by our graduate engineers, these methods have impressed engineering management and technical colleagues alike as new standards of “best practice” to emulate within their organizations.

Teach presentations anywhere: Strategies for success in teaching online presentations

Great presenters are made, not born—but where they are made is the subject of this workshop. Due to the interactive nature of presentations, many students and instructors alike believe that presentations must be taught in a face to face classroom environment. That belief is challenged in this workshop as the facilitator, who has taught presentations online for well over a decade, shares best practices, sample activities, assignments, and rubrics, as she walks participants through how to design their own online presentation course for to target specific audiences.

Understand Audience Needs

Knowing how to anticipate audience needs is an essential skill every technical presenter should have. Whether the audience needs to know more about technical details, production times, ROI, or client appeal, the savvy presenter must address those concerns. This chapter discusses the scope of content and how to connect to the audience. The chapter explains the use of elevator talks as a means of audience analysis and discusses the challenges of approaching complex technical topics for diverse audiences. Careful audience analysis should provide the basis for planning the scope of any presentation. Showing the audience that the presenter cares about what they want to gain from the presentation will let them see the presenter as a prepared and confident speaker before he has uttered a single word. Finally, the chapter addresses all of those pesky ?>getting ready ?> logistical questions that speakers need to resolve before giving a talk.

Temper the Templates

Templates can be powerful tools to have at hand. They can do some very heavy lifting, providing visual structure, suggestions on format, branding, and so forth. This chapter investigates templates and how they can work better for particular needs. Templates impart some stability and consistency to the visual message and tone of presentations created throughout the enterprise. The purpose of a branded template is to give presence, consistency, and distinction to an organization within a sea of competitors. The chapter presents an example of a typical company template that is often convenient for technical information. It also suggests several workarounds, when templates present challenges to content design, that allow to assert control over the header and the main acreage of the slide again regardless of the template. By using templates and adhering to some standardization of processes for communication pieces, one can convey order, continuity, and quality.

Mind the gap: using lessons learned from practicing engineers to teach engineering ethics to undergraduates

Given the range and complexity of ethical dilemmas arising in professional workplaces, engineering educators attempting to bring elements of ethics instruction into their courses and majors must convince undergraduates that discussion cases used for in-class reflection represent reality in the working world. To support this teaching approach, it is often useful to pull in evidence and voices from practicing engineers to lend credibility to engineering ethics discussions. However, our NSF-funded study revealed some surprising results about the ways in which practicing engineers viewed their own perceptions of what ethics are and are not. Thus, if practicing engineers themselves are not quite clear about how to articulate ethical issues, we should wonder how to use their case studies to the best possible end in the classroom. We discovered that a slight shift in vocabulary, speaking of “quality” or “integrity” instead of “ethics” with practicing engineers triggered recognition of ethical dilemmas. Those words resonate with engineers, and we propose that similar shifts in teaching can open up new vistas of understanding and application in undergraduate engineering ethics teaching.

Sliding headfirst: Engineering work, presentations, and translations

In the complex world of engineering work, whether on the job or at school, communication tasks often suffer from the same constraints as any project: time, money, and quality all strain the communicator. Too often, engineering presentations do not get the attention that they deserve from their creators, and this allows for information loss, misunderstandings, and problematic use of the slideware files. Herein we discuss the basics tenets of slide reform: sentence headers, high-value targeted visuals, and notes for archival purposes. As well, this workshop will propose some techniques that can assist technical presentations when more than one language prevails in the audience. We will discuss and consider how the acreage of both the slide and the notes features can assist presenters in communicating and transmitting information via slideware, whether during a live talk, in a web conference, or as a legacy piece. Notice: This is a workshop presentation. Many examples will be given during the workshop at IPCC 2013.