Communicating in a Global Context: Know Your Audience
Webinar Length: 1 Hour
Purpose and Background
This webinar explains the rationale for knowing your audience and adapting your style for effective communication. It also provides action steps to help you prepare for conversations with various stakeholders.
It’s not enough to excel at the technical components of engineering, successful engineers need to be able to communicate effectively with various groups and individuals in a wide range of settings. Communicating effectively involves preparation and knowing how to anticipate and navigate challenging conversations with ease. Engineers are known for being knowledgeable and highly skilled and involved in work that impacts society. Challenges arise and opportunities are missed when engineers cannot convince others of the importance of their ideas or of solutions to problems. To do so, engineers must know their audience and be able to share information with them respectfully, and in a way that involves them and helps them feel informed.
This webinar was inspired by a senior professional engineer, Kevin Forbes, who appreciates the importance of engineers being able to adapt their communication style and messaging to different audiences. Kevin is the Director of Engineering at the Indianapolis Airport Authority.
“If an engineer’s primary goal is ultimately to solve problems for society, this goal may not be fulfilled if engineers cannot communicate effectively. Engineers can develop great solutions, but if we cannot effectively explain to society a solution is safe and viable, then we have failed.” -Kevin Forbes, P.E.
This webinar is designed to enhance participants’ communication skills, enabling information to be delivered in a purposeful and persuasive way—with knowing your audience at the foundation of all effective communications. It also aims to guide engineers through the process of assessing and understanding an audience by using a set of key questions.
Learning Outcomes (Course Objectives)
Upon completion of this webinar, participants will be able to:
- Prepare for communicating with diverse stakeholders using an audience assessment.
- Appreciate foundational skills including self-awareness and empathy in the communication process.
- Posture yourself more confidently in front of different audiences.
- Effectively communicate ideas and persuade others.
Specific Knowledge or Skill Obtained
This webinar teaches the following specific knowledge and skills:
- Critical thinking skills used to evaluate and anticipate audience interactions.
- Communication best practices including foundational skills such as self-awareness and empathy.
- Techniques for identifying and assessing audiences and for developing the action steps you will use to communicate effectively with different audiences.
Assessment of Learning Outcomes
Certificate of Completion
Participants’ achievement of the learning outcomes will be assessed via a multiple-chose quiz consisting of 10 questions.
Intended Audience
This webinar applies to licensed professional engineers, technical, and other business professionals.
Webinar Outline
- Engineering related disasters and communication
- Communication and its components
- Costs of ineffective communication
- Benefits of effective communication
- Communicating effectively in a global context
- Understanding self-awareness
- Knowing your audience
- Understanding empathy
Earn Your Professional Development Hours and Get Your Certificate of Completion
You will be able to immediately print a certificate of completion after passing an online post-test with a passing score of 70% or higher. PDH credits are only awarded after course completion and successful passing of the quiz. This webinar earns 1 PDH upon successful completion of the quiz.