An Examination of Communicative Methods Employed in the Industrial Engineering Community

1 October 2015

An Examination of Communicative Methods Employed in the Industrial Engineering Community

Accurate and effective communication is essential for the success of any career. Given the specificity and technicality that can sometimes accompany the task of industrial engineers, communication must be one of the most polished and accessible skills of the array of tools they have at their disposal to achieve their goals. This is not to say that an engineer’s wealth of technical knowledge, logical thinking and mechanical know-how should be in any way diminished in their importance. If an industrial engineer lacked the ability to properly communicate their studies, exercises and findings to the recipients of their services, however, the problems that they seek to rectify would be doomed to remain resolved in theory, but still perpetually unsolved in practice. A solution that cannot be implemented is truly no real solution, but merely an idea. Through a series of sources including personal interviews of people working in this field, the analysis of engineering journals and an exploration of the website and statistical data representing the field of industrial engineering, careful attention will be paid to the types of communicative processes and the success of these will be ascertained in an attempt to better illustrate the importance of strong and varied communication within the engineering arena.

As industrial engineers are responsible for ascertaining situations, assessing problematic processes and inefficiencies and proposing solutions to those problems, poor communication on the part of the engineer would result in the job being only partially completed. In examining the various communicative practices within the field of engineering, it is important to take into account the practices of those actively involved in the field. Understanding the types of communication these individuals utilize on a daily basis, as well as which methods they prefer, will...