Engineers need communication skills because most engineering decisions only work if other people can understand the technical work and act on it. Across studies published between 2001 and 2025, communication consistently ranks alongside teamwork, data analysis, and problem solving as a core professional competency. Employers also repeatedly report that entry-level engineers are weaker at it than the importance they assign to it would suggest. For a personal-finance reader, the practical question is how much this affects career progression and earnings. The answer is that the link is plausible and supported by some evidence, but the studies reviewed here do not measure pay directly.
What engineers actually use communication for
Engineering work is rarely finished when the calculation is correct. A design, a test result, or a cost estimate has to be understood by people who did not run the analysis, and many of them have the authority to approve, fund, or reject it. Three situations come up repeatedly in the professional-competency studies.
Explaining findings, assumptions, and recommendations
An engineer who can state a finding, the assumptions behind it, and the decision it supports gives managers something they can act on. An engineer who cannot tends to produce delays: follow-up questions, rework, or a decision made without the technical input it needed. The same skill applies in reports, emails, and meetings, and it is what turns a correct analysis into a result someone uses.
Coordinating technical work across a team
The evidence treats teamwork and communication as closely connected rather than as separate qualities. A 2017 systematic review by Honor J. Passow and Christian H. Passow concluded that engineering practice involves coordinating several competencies to accomplish goals. In practice, that means passing information between disciplines, keeping schedules and interfaces aligned, and raising problems early. The National Academy of Engineering’s 2018 review quotes Carmella Tomeny, a mechanical design engineer and customer liaison, who said: “I would say that teamwork is a large part of succeeding in my job.” Her account was collected through a 2015 questionnaire and is presented as an illustration, not as a statistic about engineers generally.
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Communicating with people outside engineering
Customers, managers, regulators, and finance teams often need the same technical result described at different levels of detail. An engineer may need to shorten the technical content for a budget decision and expand it for a peer review, while keeping the substance accurate in both. This is where employer studies find the largest gap, discussed below.
What the evidence shows
Several studies from different populations and years point in the same direction. They do not measure the same thing, so they should be read as a set of related findings rather than one combined score.
Rank #2
| Study | Year | Who or what was studied | What it measured | Finding on communication |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Honor J. Passow, Journal of Engineering Education | 2012 | Graduates from 11 engineering majors; survey pattern stable across seven administrations from 1999 to 2005 | How important graduates rated ABET competencies in their work | Communication was rated significantly higher than a lower cluster that included contemporary issues, design of experiments, and understanding impacts; it sat with teamwork, data analysis, and problem solving |
| Hirudayaraj, Baker, Baker, and Eastman, Education Sciences | 2021 | Nearly 500 companies and organizations | Importance and entry-level proficiency for 26 engineering professional skills | Communication with diverse groups showed the greatest difference between importance and proficiency |
| Passow and Passow, Journal of Engineering Education (systematic review) | 2017 | Quantitative synthesis: 27 studies and 14,429 participants. Qualitative analysis: 25 studies, 2,174 participants, and 36,100 job postings | Which competencies undergraduate engineering programs should emphasize | Engineering practice involves coordinating competencies to accomplish goals; communication is part of that set |
| Brumberger and Ellsworth, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication | 2025 | First-year engineering communication and capstone work at one institutional context, plus practitioner surveys and follow-up interviews | Whether students build communication skills from first year to capstone, and how practitioners view graduates | First-year student work was weak, with no substantial improvement by capstone; practitioners viewed capstone students more favorably than recent graduate hires |
| National Academy of Engineering, Understanding the Educational and Career Pathways of Engineers, chapter 2 | 2018 | National review of engineering education and career pathways, drawing on faculty and employer views | Curriculum changes after ABET EC2000 and employer perceptions | More than half of surveyed faculty said their institutions put greater curricular emphasis on oral and written communication and teamwork; employers saw improvement, but concerns about graduates’ professional skills persisted |
The strongest single signal for a career reader is the employer study. Its 2021 data came from nearly 500 companies and organizations, and its finding is about the gap, not about communication being unimportant. Importance was rated high, and entry-level proficiency lagged it, particularly for communicating with diverse groups.
Where graduates fall short
Writing for workplace audiences
The 2025 institutional study by Brumberger and Ellsworth looked at workplace genres such as engineering report executive summaries and emails. Its finding that first-year student writing was weak and had not substantially improved by capstone is specific to that institution and its course design. It should not be read as an estimate for every engineering program. Its practitioner interviews do suggest that employers judge graduates on exactly these everyday written products.
Rank #3
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Assuming technical coursework builds communication on its own
The same study cautions against assuming students automatically improve these skills through technical coursework alone. Communication often gets treated as something students will pick up through projects. The evidence does not support that assumption without explicit practice, feedback, and assessment.
Does it affect career advancement and earnings?
The only study reviewed here that links communication training to career outcomes is a 2001 survey of recent engineering graduates by Pneena Sageev and Carol J. Romanowski, published in the Journal of Engineering Education. It reported a direct relationship between the amount of technical communication instruction graduates received and their career advancement. The source summary available for this article does not report effect sizes or enough method detail to support a causal claim, so the finding shows an association rather than a guarantee.
Rank #4
No study reviewed here reports salary effects. For your own planning, treat communication as one factor in career progression alongside technical skill, experience, and the employer’s own promotion structure. A course or workshop on its own is not a promotion plan.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to build the skill without spending much
The studies name several approaches that appear in skill-development work: explicit curriculum, feedback, teamwork, and active or experiential learning. They do not establish one best intervention or product, so the steps below use those approaches and cost little or nothing.
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- Lead every technical deliverable with a short summary. Write three to five sentences covering the finding, the decision it supports, and the main assumption. This is the workplace genre the 2025 study examined.
- Ask for written feedback on one document a quarter. Request specific comments on clarity, not only on technical accuracy. Your manager or a senior colleague can provide this.
- Practice explaining one project to a non-engineer. Use two minutes and no jargon. If the listener cannot restate the decision, revise the explanation.
- Volunteer for cross-functional work. Customer calls, procurement reviews, and budget meetings give direct practice with diverse audiences, which is where employer studies found the largest gap.
- Take a coordination role on team projects. Track open questions, owners, and deadlines in writing. This connects communication to the teamwork and coordination the evidence emphasizes.
Limits of the evidence
- The studies differ in population, year, geography, and method. Alumni rated the importance of competencies, employers rated expected importance against recent-graduate proficiency, a systematic review combined earlier work, and the 2025 study assessed one institutional course sequence with practitioner input.
- No single global skill-gap percentage is established, and no universal ranking applies across all engineering roles.
- No study reviewed here establishes what share of an engineer’s working day goes to communication, so no such figure is given.
- The competency wording “An ability to communicate effectively” comes from ABET EC2000 as reproduced in the 2018 National Academy of Engineering report. It is historical, listed as outcome 7 among eleven criteria alongside the ability to function on multidisciplinary teams. Check ABET’s current official criteria for present-day wording, because this article does not confirm the current cycle’s text.
Read together, the studies support communication as a core engineering competency, a recurring gap for new graduates, and a plausible link to career advancement that has not been measured in pay terms.
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