Soft Skills Plus

Abstract

Carl and Fred discuss the wide range of soft skills that reliability engineers need to learn, in order to be fully successful in their jobs.

Key Points

Join Carl and Fred as they discuss student feedback from a course that Fred recently taught. During his office hours, many students were very interested in learning more about communications skills.
Topics include:

• You can influence engineering teams by improving your communication skills.
• You cannot do well as reliability engineers by mastering technical skills only.
• Why do you need soft skills? What is the principle?
• You need to convey what you know in a way that is acceptable.
• Soft skills include listening, questioning, feedback, facilitating, running meetings, presenting, and many others.
• What do you want people to walk away with? Fine tune your message.
• You can study soft skills; there are lots of resources available.
• Find the part of your message that excites your personal passion.
• Ask a friend to give you feedback on your presentation.
• Preparation is essential to good presentations.
• Practice works best along with feedback.
• Listening is the first skill in our chapter on soft skills.
• Observe body language and listen to your audience.

Enjoy an episode of Speaking of Reliability. Where you can join friends as they discuss reliability topics. Join us as we discuss topics ranging from design for reliability techniques to field data analysis approaches.

Show Notes