Engineers (are) Always Write

My chosen discipline is engineering. When most people think of the skills needed to be an engineer they think of math, science, and technical skills. While they’re certainly not wrong, and those skills are required of an engineer, one skill that often goes unmentioned is writing. While it seems that writing is largely ignored by many pursuing a career in engineering it is one of the most important skills in the eyes of employers. The most common complaint among employers is that there are plenty of engineers who have the technical skills to be successful but few who are also effective communicators.

As an engineer you are expected to work alongside several other engineers as a team to complete projects. Naturally, in order for several people to come together for a common purpose communication must ensue, and this is where writing becomes a vitally important part of my chosen discipline. Some of the most important pieces of writing in my career may be as simple as an email to a coworker but can have a dramatic difference in the level of communication in the workplace.

Another common form of writing seen in my discipline is research. An engineer faces a very wide variety of problems and are expected to be able to solve a multitude of different problems. An engineer may not already know everything there is to know about their specific project and will often use research to find supplemental information and be able to come up with a solution faster and more efficiently. Writing down their researched information helps them to communicate what they have found to others as well as make a new resource for them that contains all of the relevant information they have found on a subject contained in one document.

While writing is often pushed to the side and largely ignored in engineering education the value of an engineer willing and able to communicate effectively through writing has become an increasingly desirable trait in the eyes of employers. Writing in my discipline is an integral part of a successful engineering career.