Communications: Technical Literacy

As a new PhD in academia, you have honed your communication skills as an expert and have hours of presentations to other experts. You have for the most part mastered the expert-to-expert audience presentation. Transitioning your career to anything outside of academia, be it business or government or NGO’s, will result in communicating with a variety of audiences. Expert-to-nonexpert audience presentations requires mastery beyond technical content to include affective, persuasive, engaging, participative, shared purpose and shared identity.  This is a 101 introduction as your first step in preparing technical presentations for nontechnical audiences.