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The profession of civil engineering requires years of education that include good knowledge of mathematics and other essential sciences. It takes a lot of effort to gain the necessary qualifications.
In order to be a good civil engineer, in addition to basic skills, you need to develop “soft” ones. This way, you will attract more customers, maintain a good relationship, and work with them for a long time.
In the article below, we provided you with six ways that, as a civil engineer, you can more easily explain your ideas to clients and gain their respect.
Use PowerPoint Presentations Creatively
Design PowerPoint with a purpose. It’s not a PowerPoint that will just fill in the blank wall behind you or a PowerPoint that will repeat your presentation in a bullet-point format. These types of PPTs are useless.
What you want instead is to create a PowerPoint that complements your presentation, which completes it as a narrative story. This means choosing the PowerPoint presentation design that best suits your narrative structure. Good presentation ideas are usually lost in mediocre design. Your presentation should include all pertinent information that will assist you in better emphasizing your ideas and future projects to your clients, and your civil engineering projects will undoubtedly profit from the use of every tool that PowerPoint has to offer.
All of these strategies involve the use of quotations, important words, and other visual components that assist rather than dominate your presentation’s persuasive force.
Think of your PowerPoint as a way to guide your clients through the presentation by keeping them engaged and focused at all times.
Use Innovative Softwares
As a civil engineer, we suggest using innovative software made for your profession and encouraging creative thinking. It is very important that you can present ideas to your clients in a way they have never seen before. The variety of software that can serve you is great, and Revit MEP, for example, is a full BIM program that provides both 3D and 2D viewpoints on a project and simplifies engineering tasks. You can read more about Revit MEP at https://revizto.com/en/revit-mep/ and see how much versatility and improvements this solution offers, along with a variety of useful tools. Creativity also encourages innovation and the use of imagination, which is a characteristic of a good engineer. When you combine your imagination with logic and skills, then everything you imagine easily becomes reality, and that is something that your clients will recognize and value.
Not only does creativity help you interpret data and create new systems, but it also helps you find ways to more easily explain and present your ideas to clients.
Make Your Presentation Interesting With Visuals
Keep in mind that a lot of images will make your presentation more thorough, simpler to grasp, more fascinating, and smoother.
Graphs, diagrams, and pie charts illustrate your ideas and help emphasize them. Also, include images that will impress clients and make the essence of your argument memorable.
There is an important difference between saying how your solution will reduce costs by 20% and showing how it looks on a chart with real numbers. This helps you transfer the idea from the abstract theoretical domain to the concrete domain of facts.
Adding images, symbols, and even GIFs or appropriate memes to add a humorous touch to your presentation will make it more valuable and appealing.
Make Catchy Flyers
The design of your flyer is crucial. If it is too simple, it will not hold the client’s attention. The flyer should be as precise as possible. Clients need to know who you are, what you do, and what you offer in the first few seconds they look at it.
If you use pictures, take the best ones or don’t put them at all. Images have a great power of attraction and can draw attention to your idea.
Your idea should come to the fore, not your logo. Finally, provide all your contact information so that they can contact you. The phone number should be larger than the rest of the text because, otherwise, it will not be easy to find and read.
People today don’t want to do much research for anything they need, and it’s in your best interest to add profiles and social media pages and also list your website address at the bottom of the ad or flyer itself.
Present the Idea in a Pair
One head is good, but two are better. It’s great if you can bring someone else into your team to present your idea. Of course, that “someone” must have the necessary knowledge and their presence must be appropriate. This can be your colleague in the company or a representative of the company with which you cooperate and develop the idea.
Make It Personal
Another creative idea for presentations is to personalize your speech each time for the specific client you are addressing. Give examples when presenting your ideas that include your client and show what benefits your solution will have for them.
Clients may not care (or just think they don’t care) about your solution or speech if you discuss it only in general. But the moment they realize that something has a direct impact on them and that it can benefit them personally, they will start paying attention to it!
Show your clients the direct effects of your idea by including them in your examples, and you will have their full attention so that you are halfway to their approval!
P.S. Your clients don’t know as much about engineering as you do, so they might have difficulties understanding your idea. That is why it is important to avoid jargon and speak the language they understand.
Creating an idea, writing, design, creativity, and knowing the program and presentation tools is an important part of this process, but the basic prerequisite for a good presentation of an idea is to believe in it, i.e., that every word you say has value.
This way, you will avoid unpleasant questions that you cannot answer because when you build an idea, each segment should be well known to you and you will earn clients’ trust.
