4 Tips For Communicating Technical Ideas to a Non-tech Audience

Interview Preparation Technology
#1

Communicating your ideas to a non-technical audience can be really tricky. Whether it’s presenting to your non-tech team lead, or communicating with text in an email or blog post, a confused audience is never ideal! In this article, I will share some tips that I use to communicate technical ideas in an understandable way when giving a presentation or writing blog posts, no matter the audience.

Over the past four or five years, I have presented my technical ideas to a variety of both technical and non-technical people. Along the way, I realised two important things about doing so:

It is very easy for a presenter to lose an audience, and
This is more often than not due to a lack of skill in the presenter - for example, not making it easy for an audience to understand what the talk is about.
When it comes to communicating ideas effectively, it’s your job as a presenter to make your talk enjoyable, to wow the crowd, and to help get across what you want to say in a clear and easy-to-follow way.

During this time, I’ve grown-out of shying away of giving presentations, and learned what it takes to give a successful presentation. Now, I actually enjoy public speaking.

Here, I give some of the tips and tricks I’ve picked up along the way, with separate hacks for giving a talk or writing a blog post.

1.Tailoring you technical talk so that non-technical people can understand you.
2.Grabbing your audience’s attention from the start: Technical content can be quite difficult to digest. Ensuring your audience follows along from the beginning almost guarantees a successful delivery of 3.highly technical ideas.
Telling a story to make your content as coherent as possible. I find that having an incoherent talk or article will lead to a lower audience.
4.Making your technical ideas relatable to ‘the everyday’: I like to highlight the “cool” factor of my work, and not worry too much about trying to prove I’m smart. Focus on understanding, rather than losing your audience to a cloud of technical jargon.