Meeting the ECSA Outcomes: A Consulting Structural Engineer’s View on Outcome 5

Outcome 5 – Communicate clearly with others in the course of your engineering activities

?By Kim Timm (with some ChatGPT assistance)

Disclaimer: I am not an official representative of ECSA, aside from being a registered professional, nor do I participate in their review committees. My insights come from guiding technologists and engineers through the registration process. The advice I offer is informal, and you are free to use it as it suits your registration application. My experience is primarily within consulting structural engineering, so invariably my observations may be biased toward this field. Now, onto the topic...

Communication

This is arguably the easiest of the outcomes to meet but (because there is always a catch) you have to be aware that this outcome is being evaluated throughout your entire submission, not just in the blocks for Outcome 5 criteria. If your submission is filled with grammar mistakes, spelling mistakes and half-complete sentences it will not matter what you say you’ve written and presented, you will not achieve your Outcome 5 requirements.

Luckily there are lots of tools to help. Microsoft Word and Google Docs have systems to help you check your writing. You can download Grammarly for free. Please use these tools. If they suggest a correction and you ignore it, please be very, very sure that you are correct. Apply this rule throughout your submission. It is hard to validate that someone should be a registered professional when they cannot spell the word professional.?

Once again there are 3 elements to this question:

1. The ability to write clear, concise and effective technical, legal and editorially correct reports;
2. The ability to issue clear instructions to stakeholders using appropriate language;
3. The ability to execute oral presentations using structure, style, language, visual aids and supporting documents appropriate to the audience and the purpose.

Reports:

Identify examples of reports you’ve submitted. You don’t need to write out their full titles but they do need to be specific examples e.g. I wrote the conditional assessment report for all 18 structures in the XYZ Apartments Refurbishment project. It can help if your role includes reviewing other reports for correctness in addition to writing your own reports as this implies an even higher level of competence.

Instructions:

Part of the role of being a professional is issuing appropriate instructions. Can you convey to people what needs to happen in a clear and effective manner such that they willingly do it and do it correctly? This might be fixing something that has been done incorrectly or simply providing guidance. Provide specific examples of what you have done and why – if it was a phone call, how did you follow it up officially in writing? Did you add a sketch for clarity?

Presentations:

While presenting is not everyone’s favourite thing to do, as a professional, it is a skill you need. If you have not had the opportunity to present for a client, other disciplines or the public, I would suggest you organise a couple of internal presentations before you submit. The requirement is simply that your presentation is appropriate for the audience. This does not mean it needs to be a doctorate thesis or a conference paper, it can be as simple as presenting your current project to your colleagues for 20 minutes during lunchtime.?

Last note:

South African English tends to take a flexible view on American vs British English. The best thing to do is to pick one and make sure that you are consistent and you should be fine.?

Enjoy all the writing, by the time you finish your PR submission, writing engineering reports will be easy.