Communication Training for Engineers
Engineers, scientists, analysts, and developers get told to work on their communication more than almost any other profession. The advice usually comes with training built for extroverts: be more confident, tell more jokes, use more energy. That training fails technical people because it misdiagnoses the problem.
The actual problem
A technical person's instinct is to win on the merits: assemble the evidence, present it accurately, and let the strongest argument prevail. It is a good instinct, and it runs into a wall, because the people making decisions are not weighing evidence the way a compiler would. They are weighing interests: budgets they own, risks they carry, commitments they have already made out loud. When your correct argument loses, it is almost never because the data was unclear. It is because the decision-maker's interests went undiscovered, and your presentation never touched them.
What the course trains instead
| Situation engineers report | Technique drilled in the course |
|---|---|
| Leadership will not act on a technical risk | Finding the interest beneath their position, then structuring the risk as a story about that interest |
| Explanations read as condescending | Asking how instead of why, and mirroring, so the other side reaches the conclusion with you |
| Losing to a worse argument made confidently | Steelmanning the other side out loud before answering, which earns the room's attention for your case |
| Getting talked over in meetings | Composure drills under live pressure, in a room of eight, with correction |
Attention is the most valuable thing anyone owns, and technical professionals routinely ask for it with the least persuasive tool available: a wall of accurate detail. The course teaches you to shape the same accurate material so people want to hear it. Nothing is dumbed down. The logic stays. The delivery changes.
Who shows up
Recent cohorts have included engineers, agronomists, financial analysts, physicians, and founders of technical companies. The room self-selects for people who describe themselves as detail-oriented and logical, which is precisely why the practice rounds work: nobody in the room is impressed by hand-waving.
Who teaches it
Vance Crowe was the Director of Millennial Engagement at Monsanto, where he engaged the company's fiercest critics face to face during the GMO controversies. Before that he was a communications strategist at the World Bank Group and a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya. He holds a Master's in Cross-Cultural Negotiations from Seton Hall's School of Diplomacy, serves on the Board of Directors of FCS Financial, a seven-billion-dollar agricultural lending cooperative, and has spoken to more than 300,000 people across more than 200 keynotes. He created the Interest-Based Communication methodology, codified into a workbook and structured course materials; facilitator Heath Hunter also delivers the course.
What participants say
“I don't think I've learned more in a three-day period than I have throughout the course of a year.”
Charlie Gildehaus, Purdue University
“That interest-based communications course, which was phenomenal — we had a lot of people that attended the conference go ask about it.”
Shay Foulk, AgView Solutions
Upcoming St. Louis sessions
October 12 to 14, 2026 · November 9 to 11, 2026 · January 25 to 27, 2027 · March 22 to 24, 2027. Eight seats per session. Register at the course page below.
Common questions
- Is this public-speaking training?
- No. It is negotiation and communication training for working conversations: technical reviews, budget fights, customer escalations, partnership decisions. Presentation skills improve as a side effect of the story-structure work.
- I am skeptical of soft-skills training. Why is this different?
- Healthy instinct. The course is built from named, testable techniques rather than attitude coaching, and every technique is drilled on a real situation you bring. If a technique does not survive contact with your case in the room, you will know by day two.
- Can my company send the whole engineering team?
- Yes. The Corporate Program delivers five sessions in your building, scoped on one call, using the situations your team actually negotiates.