The Importance of English to Engineers

Decades ago, there was a pervasive misconception about the importance of English to engineers. Engineers were thought to be people who were always doing technical things behind stage. Therefore, English is not playing an important part in their career. However, more and more people are holding another view that English is an indispensable part for an engineer.The change of people's view may also reveal the significant change of demand for engineering skills.

First, English is important for communication in a large project team. As a matter of fact, big project teams consisting tens or hundreds of engineers are very common nowadays. There is a trend that projects will need teams with more and more engineers to support. In this sense, engineers need to have a good knowledge of the English language to maximize the efficiency in collaboration and quality in output. With the background of globalization, high chances are a project team would have engineers from different countries. Due to the education and culture differences, they may have different approaches to a same problem. Only by communicating effectively, collisions and misunderstanding would be minimized with inspirations created.

Second, the importance of English also lies in the selling of engineers' designs. The fact is that most of the techniques developed for solving a same problem would be similar or at least not easily distinguishable. Thus, Engineers need the skill to sell the best points of the design, to make people believe in the value of his/her design. Take Apple as an example, the mac notebooks designed by Apple are definitely not much better than notebooks produced by others in terms of performance. It is the concept behind the design that counts. It is easy to see the importance of English to engineers.
In conclusion, English is playing an important role in the career of engineers. It not only help engineers achieve higher efficiency of collaboration, it also adds value to the designs of engineers.