Advanced communication capabilities create measurable advantages across various professional contexts, yet most institutions still treat them as optional soft skills rather than essential technical infrastructure. The disconnect becomes particularly visible when federal agencies invest substantial resources to address communication deficits in technical fields.
Kennesaw State University recently received a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to integrate the ‘Story Circles’ methodology into engineering education. This initiative, led by Awatef Ergai, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering at Kennesaw State University, with co-principal investigators Shane Peterson, associate professor of German, and Ginny Zhan, professor of psychology, aims to teach communication skills through narrative dialogue, active listening, and empathy development. The NSF’s Division of Engineering Education and Centers funds this project, recognizing sophisticated communication as essential technical infrastructure for engineering students.
Unlike mere presentation polish, nuanced communication involves observation precision, interpretive flexibility, strategic word choice, and facilitating others’ articulation. These competencies develop through structured methodologies rather than innate talent. We’ll explore how workforce training platforms, educational programs, and cognitive research contribute to developing these skills, showing that sophisticated communication is a developable competency requiring significant institutional investment.
Precision in High-Stakes Environments
Healthcare research provides stark evidence of communication’s measurable impact. At the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in 2024, studies led by Dr. Fumiko Chino at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center examined 997 breast cancer survivors surveyed between July and August 2023.
The research found that poor provider communication correlated with a 64% decrease in treatment adherence. While 93.4% of participants reported generally understanding their doctors, only 27.9% felt providers adequately explained long-term side effects—a gap with direct clinical consequences.
The context reveals communication dynamics that apply universally but become visible when stakes escalate. Clearly, understanding your doctor and actually understanding what matters most are two entirely different things. Provider communication affects treatment adherence similarly to how manager communication affects team execution or teacher communication affects concept comprehension. The adherence decrease highlights that communication precision—articulating long-term implications clearly—directly determines outcome quality across contexts.If communication precision creates measurable effects, understanding specific mechanisms becomes essential. Cognitive research reveals how conversation structure and word choice affect memory and comprehension, providing empirical grounding for why certain communication approaches consistently outperform others.
Conversation and Memory
Understanding these underlying mechanisms requires examining how human cognition actually processes conversational exchanges. Sarah Brown-Schmidt, a professor of psychology and human development, leads a National Science Foundation-funded study on cognitive mechanisms underlying conversation and memory. Her research reveals a core asymmetry: people remember best what they say themselves in conversation, showing worse memory for what others tell them. It isn’t merely about attention or engagement but involves cognitive processes activated during self-articulation.
Brown-Schmidt elaborates on the role of word choice in memory retention: “We have discovered that people tend to remember best what they say themselves in conversation and have a comparatively worse memory for what was said to them. We also find that the words we choose influence what is remembered. For example, if your friend points out a cute dog on campus and remarks on its fluffy ears, adding that extra bit of detail will make that dog—and particularly its ears—memorable.” Her team builds computational models inspired by the brain to emphasize or de-emphasize phrases like ‘fluffy ears’ to evaluate their impact on replicating human performance. “The chief advantage of this is that it can give us concrete ideas about how memory works.”
These findings explain why sophisticated communicators who use specific language and facilitate others’ articulation build stronger relationships and collaborations. For instance, managers who ask targeted questions prompting team members to articulate challenges create better retention than those who lecture about obstacles. Teachers guiding students to verbalize reasoning develop deeper understanding than those who simply explain answers.
The conversation mechanism—self-articulation driving retention and precision anchoring memory—explains professional advantages that appear as ‘good communication skills.’ Understanding these mechanics raises practical questions about how organizations develop these capabilities in workforces, treating communication as technical infrastructure.
Communication in Workforce Development
In today’s professional landscape, there’s a growing recognition that communication isn’t just an accessory but a core component of workforce infrastructure. Online learning platforms are increasingly integrating communication into professional development to address this need.
Take Coursera, for instance. Its Enterprise division partners with universities and companies to deliver over 8,000 courses—including Professional Certificates in front-end development, data analysis, project management, and cybersecurity—helping organizations build both technical and communication skills. The platform equips individuals with advanced communication and technical skills that are essential in today’s diverse social and professional contexts through its comprehensive course offerings. The dual focus reflects a primary shift in how organizations view communication—not as window dressing for technical expertise, but as the infrastructure that makes technical skills actually useful in collaborative environments.
The approach positions communication as professional infrastructure—a foundational competency enabling technical skills to generate organizational value across contexts where domain expertise must translate into collaborative action, stakeholder alignment, and strategic execution. The workforce development model shows how communication training can scale beyond individual coaching to systematic capability building, which mirrors the structured methodologies emerging in educational programs designed specifically around communication skill development.
Narrative Dialogue for Technical Skills
Educational programs achieving rapid communication skill development often employ indirect methodologies like narrative dialogue for technical students. The NSF Story Circles grant highlights this principle by integrating narrative dialogue into junior-level engineering courses to develop active listening, empathy, and communication skills aligned with industry needs.
Using personal storytelling to teach future engineers seems tangential to technical education but addresses a core challenge: engineering students often resist traditional communication training as irrelevant to their identities. Story Circles bypasses this resistance by embedding communication development within collaborative dialogue authentic to student experience. It’s oddly fitting that teaching engineers to build bridges starts with building conversational ones.
Students develop sophisticated listening, interpretive flexibility, and clear articulation organically through narrative exchange, transferring these capabilities to technical contexts. The method builds communication infrastructure without triggering self-consciousness associated with direct presentation training.
A parallel approach operates in medical education using visual observation rather than narrative dialogue. Both methods share a pedagogical principle: using non-obvious content domains to develop transferable skills.
Visual Strategies for Medical Precision
Medical education programs using Visual Thinking Strategies show that advanced communication encompasses observation precision, interpretive flexibility, and evidence-supported claims—capacities developed more effectively through guided art observation than direct clinical training.
Gauri Agarwal, associate professor of clinical medicine at the Miller School of Medicine, describes Visual Thinking Strategies: “Visual Thinking Strategies give health professions students a powerful framework for slowing down, observing carefully, and communicating precisely. These are skills that are essential in both clinical reasoning and compassionate care.”
“Through guided discussion of art,” Agarwal continues, “students learn to embrace multiple perspectives, tolerate ambiguity, and support their interpretations with evidence, which are abilities that translate directly to the bedside.” Art observation teaches medical students the same skills required for patient diagnosis and care team collaboration.
The shared pedagogical principle between Story Circles and Visual Thinking Strategies uses non-obvious content domains to develop transferable capabilities. Sophisticated communication combines observation accuracy, interpretive openness to ambiguity, evidence-supported claims, and precise articulation of complex assessments. These teaching innovations raise questions about how educational institutions measure whether communication skills are actually developing, leading to parallel evolution in assessment methods.
Evolving Assessment Methods
Educational institutions revising assessment methods show growing recognition that communication ability constitutes knowledge display itself. Penn State’s Linguistics program underwent assessment evolution. Associate teaching professor Deborah Morton explained the changes.
Faculty review identified that multiple-choice exams failed to measure students’ linguistic knowledge effectively. Starting in Spring 2024, the program implemented open-ended questions and draft submission processes with feedback, requiring students to exhibit linguistic understanding through clear communication rather than answer recognition. Turns out testing whether students can recognize correct answers isn’t the same as testing whether they understand anything.
The linguistics student who can articulate phonological principles clearly possesses essentially different competency than one who identifies correct answers about phonological rules. The shift from recognition to articulation represents a core reframing of what constitutes knowledge mastery, treating communication ability as the knowledge itself rather than a vehicle for displaying it.
Intensive Training for Performance
Assessment-driven approaches manifest in specialized educational programs designed around specific performance requirements. Intensive assessment preparation programs exhibit how structured training enhances students’ abilities to articulate complex ideas under formal evaluation conditions.
Revision Village, an online revision platform for International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma and International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) students, provides an example of this approach. The platform, used internationally, offers its Individual Oral (IO) Bootcamp—a free intensive workshop designed to help students master the Internal Assessment (IA) component of IB English Language & Literature. Why does concentrated preparation work better than extended study? The answer lies in how assessment pressure creates focused learning environments where students must exhibit communication capabilities under specific constraints.
The bootcamp addresses the specific requirements of the IB English IA component, a formal assessment requirement, through focused preparation. By offering this intensive workshop at no cost, the platform shows accessibility while concentrating training within compressed timeframes to help students develop the precise communication skills needed to articulate complex literary analysis under formal evaluation conditions.
The intensive bootcamp format exemplifies the broader principle of assessment-driven training introduced at this section’s opening. When educational programs structure training around specific performance requirements—whether the IB English IA or other formal assessments—they create focused environments where students develop targeted communication capabilities. The bootcamp approach reveals how concentrated preparation, designed explicitly around assessment demands, enhances students’ abilities to communicate complex ideas effectively under evaluation pressure. The concentrated training model represents one manifestation of the systematic institutional investments now emerging across educational and professional contexts.
Infrastructure Over Instinct
The substantial NSF investment in Story Circles engineering training represents more than curriculum enhancement funding—it quantifies institutional confidence that sophisticated communication capabilities are systematically developable. The convergence includes healthcare research documenting treatment adherence decreases from poor precision and cognitive research revealing conversation behaviors driving memory retention.
The convergence collectively exhibits that communication excellence doesn’t emerge from natural eloquence or confident personality but develops through structured training treating it as a technical competency combining observation accuracy, interpretive flexibility, strategic word choice, dialogue facilitation, and performance display under pressure.
The evidence is definitive. Poor provider communication correlates with 64% treatment adherence drops. Federal grants of $200,000 recognize communication as technical infrastructure. Institutional curriculum overhauls sweep from Penn State to engineering programs nationwide. These investments reflect recognition that in contexts where collaboration determines success, communication sophistication multiplies domain expertise effectiveness. The pattern reveals systematic institutional commitment to developing communication as technical capability, echoing the Story Circles methodology that opened this analysis. Yet most organizations still invest more systematically in software training than in the human communication skills that determine whether that software actually improves anything.
It’s time to give human communication the same institutional rigor we apply to our software tools.
