CASE
(Career Acquisition Skills Enhancement)

Topic: Effective Communication Workshop

Program Description: Effective communication is the most important aspect of being able to properly convey your thoughts, ideas and finding. Successful engineers can efficiently and powerfully communicate on both a technical and non-technical level. The proposed workshop will provide students with a supportive environment in which they can demonstrate their own communication skills and receive constructive and honest feedback on their abilities. From the workshop, students will gain an understanding of the importance of good communication skills, and the areas in which they may need to work to improve.

Approach: Effective communication is divided into three basic parts; written, verbal communication, and public speaking. For each school, it should be determined which of the three parts is applicable for the workshop planned. Organization of a complete workshop is then composed of a combination of two or more parts of these basic parts.

The first basic part would be to provide written instructions for a common task. The choice of the task is left to the organizer, but the task must be an every day task that is understood by everyone. In addition, the scope of the task should be explicitly defined as to narrow the task to a one page instruction sheet. Some examples of the assigned task may be dialing a specific phone number, making a photo copy or making a withdrawal from an ATM machine. The students will submit their written instructions to a panel of technical publications judges who will grade them on completeness of their instructions, the clarity of their instructions and if the instructions addressed the inherent variety of phones, copy machines and ATMs. Submission and judging of the written instructions should occur before the remainder of the events. The feedback from this exercise will demonstrate the importance and difficulty in providing written communications to an audience.

For the second basic part participants will be divided into teams. The number of teams will depend on the number of students participating, and number of students each facilitator is comfortable in instructing. The number of students in each group will generally be between three and seven. Once the students have been divided up into teams, each group will elect a spokesperson, then as a group, come up with a list of verbal instructions for the facilitator to perform a specific task. The guidelines are similar to the written instructions, but the task can be more complicated. Each facilitator will be responsible for choosing the task which he will be asked to perform, and provide any supplies which may be needed. Some examples of a task may be making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, tying a shoelace or tie, or wrapping a package. Once each group has elected a spokesperson and generated a list of instructions, they will begin to instruct the facilitator in the task. The spokesperson should be placed so there is no visual feedback to his instructions, and the facilitator should perform the instructions precisely (interpreting the instructions as liberally as they wish). The point of this exercise is to demonstrate the difficulty in providing verbal instruction, and the necessity to be responsible in how the communication is being interpreted. After all teams have had their turn, the facilitators will have a panel discussion regarding the virtues of verbal communication.

The final basic part is for each participant to give a 2 minute talk about themselves. The public speaking judges will evaluate how clearly the participant speaks, call the participants attention to any nervous habits they might have while speaking, and give an overall evaluation of how the talk was presented. The content of the talk is not important and is not factored into the final evaluation.

The Technical Publications Judge

The technical publication judge is someone with special knowledge of effective technical writing. Examples might be instructors of a technical writing course or technical writers from a local company. The instructions to the judges should be clear that the goal of this workshop is to help students identify areas in which they may improve. Comments should be accurate, yet constructive.

Verbal Communications Facilitator

The verbal communications facilitator is someone who can bring humor and instructions together. They can be college instructors or persons from local industry. This facilitator must understand that for students to learn from this exercise, they must follow the team instructions "exactly". Someone who can do this with a sense of humor or flare would be a perfect candidate for this exercise.

Public Speaking Judge

The public speaking judge should be someone who is able to give feedback on both public speaking ability, and the appropriateness of the speaker's appearance. This could be a human resources person from a local company, a representative of a local company which teaches these skills to people in industry, a person from a local department store clothing department or local fashion consultant.
 

Intended Outcome: Effectiveness of the workshop will be measured by student evaluations, the percentage of students from the department who sign up for an event, and the evaluations from the judges and facilitators. The workshop can be combined with a larger engineering event in which awards for the "best of" could be presented.