English for Engineers
English for Engineers is a podcast hosted by Olivia Augustin, a civil engineer and certified English teacher who specializes in teaching Technical and Business English to engineers. The show features chalk talks, practical language tips, and interviews with communication specialists and STEM professionals. It aims to help engineers become skilled communicators in a global engineering culture, with a focus on the cultural aspects of international business communication.
Episodes
Fluent on Paper, Stuck in the Room
You test well. Your grammar is solid. But put you on the spot in a meeting — a question you didn't see coming, a design decision you have to defend right now — and something breaks down.That's not an English problem. That's a communication problem. And it's completely fixable.This episode of English for Engineers is for non-native English speakers in technical and engineering roles
Do Intensive English Courses Work? What Happens on Day 4
Fly somewhere for 3 days. Get a native speaker. Pay a premium, because expensive must mean good. Three things engineers get sold about learning English — and all three are wrong in a way you can test like a spec sheet. This one's for every engineer who's ever asked me if a 3-day miracle is worth it.Spoiler: I have opinions.The episode in one lineWhy the 3-day English intensive doesn't
Would You Mind Being Our Boss? Mentoring Young Engineers
Noelia Gozalo moved from Spain to Ireland in 2010 to study engineering in English. She had passed the required exams. She had spent years at the official School of Languages. Then she sat in her first strength of materials lecture and understood nothing.She was not an Erasmus student. There was no easier version of the course. She followed the lectures, passed the assignments and sat the same exam
Feeling at Home in a Second Language
Why is a Dutch teacher on a podcast about English for engineers? Because the problem is the same in every language.Rebecca van Raamsdonk runs Nabu Academy, a Dutch-language school for advanced learners at B2 and C1 levels. Her students know the grammar. They have the words. And then they stand at a Dutch party and say almost nothing.Olivia and Rebecca compare notes on what actually goes wrong at t
Authentic Leadership for Engineers: Visibility, Feedback and Trust
Saskia Slotboom was 30, chairing a project team, and telling engineers twice her age what to do. She did not feel like a leader yet.She trained as an architect, graduated in building technology, and expected a career in calculations. Six months into her first job she was miserable. What she actually wanted was people. That took her into project management at a Dutch government agency, and eventual
Spare the Details: Explaining Technical Work to Non-Technical Stakeholders
Johan Bel has commissioned a coal power plant and helped rebuild 37 kilometres of the busiest motorway in the Netherlands. The engineering was never the hard part. Explaining it to people who had never read a technical drawing was.Johan is a technical consultant in Rotterdam and co-founder of Ingenieursgroep Nederland. He works in industrial automation, systems engineering and asset management. Mo
Neurolanguage Coaching and its Advantages for Engineers
Neurolanguage coaching blends neuroscience, language expertise and coaching into one method. Olivia kept seeing the term on LinkedIn without knowing what it meant. So she asked someone who does.Cathy Intro is a certified Neurolanguage Coach based in Montreal. She trains other teachers to become coaches, and she hosts the podcast My Polyglot Life en français. In this crossover episode she explains
Multilingual Engineering Projects: How Three Countries Build in Three Languages
Multilingual engineering projects are normal now. Running one in three languages at the same time is not.Olivia talks to Dr Omar Chávez Alegría — civil engineer, professor and researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro in Mexico — about the Eco-Innovation Network, a research collaboration between universities in Mexico, the United States and Canada.The network sits under the Commission fo
How to Choose a Technical Translator: What Engineers Should Look For
Wondering how to choose a technical translator for your engineering documents?In this episode of English for Engineers, I talk to Alice Miozzo Zana and Pierre-Yves Zana from TradZana. Alice is an Italian technical and marketing translator. Pierre-Yves is a French engineer turned technical translator, with a Master of Science in electrical engineering and four years at Bosch behind him.We look at w
Career Advice for Engineers Moving to Denmark (and Beyond)
Career advice for engineers moving abroad: Olivia talks with Kate Dahl, career consultant and founder of Career Denmark, about the mindset that actually helps you integrate — not just the paperwork. They get into leaving the expat bubble, learning the language before you think you need it, and choosing discomfort over the easy option. Kate also shares her own move from small-town America to buildi
Three Lessons from Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Schwarzenegger has 3 lessons for every engineer learning English, and none of them involve grammar.Before he was Terminator, Governor, or bodybuilding's most quoted man, Arnold was an Austrian immigrant. People mocked his accent, his body, and his ambitions.In this quick chalk talk, Olivia pulls three lessons from his story for your English.Ask anyone for help — he even took notes from
How Technical Translators Work: The Unsung Heroes of Engineering
Your English teacher is not your translator. Olivia says no every time a client asks her to "just quickly translate" a contract or a manual — and in this episode you'll hear exactly why those are two different jobs.She sits down with Anthoinette Međjedović-van Winkoop and Chelsea Janssen from HTT – Helena Technical Translations to open up a profession most engineers never think about, until a dead
Authentically Aussie: How Engineers Get Hired in Australia
Natalie Peart swapped rainy Scotland for sunny Australia — and now she helps international engineers land the Australian career they came for. In this episode, she and Olivia get into what actually gets engineers hired down under: why Australia is crying out for civil engineers right now, how Aussie workplaces are "relaxed but traditional" (and why that trips people up), why the IELTS test isn't r
Writing Work Emails in English (Without the Panic)
Meetings? Fine. Technical skills? No problem. It's the blank email, alone in your office, that sends most non-native engineers over the edge.In this episode, Olivia shares eight practical tips for writing work emails in English — from studying how native speakers actually structure their messages, to knowing when a well-placed "please" does more work than perfect grammar, to finally building your
All Your Ducks in a Row: Language Barriers & Home Buying Abroad
Buying a home is stressful enough in your own language. Now imagine doing it in your second, third, or fourth — while also trying to figure out what your realtor means when she tells you to get "all your ducks in a row."In this episode, I sit down with my friend Candice Lee, a realtor and relocation specialist who's helped executives and specialists from companies like BMW, Google, Richemont, and
5 Strategies to Improve Your Technical English
In this episode of English for Engineers, Olivia is talking about 5 strategies to improve your technical English. As a professional, you already know how important it is to communicate clearly with your co-workers, and that’s why Olivia put together 5 tips for helping you master technical English with an engineering focus. In this episode you'll learn:About mastering cultural differencesHow to foc
Clear is Kind - A Crossover Episode with Aimee Arsenault
This episode is a crossover you didn't know you needed. Olivia sits down with Aimee Arsenault, founder of Transmit Safety, to talk about the skill that keeps engineers and safety pros out of trouble: being clear without losing the relationship. From holding your ethical line when a project manager pushes back, to the real difference between "engineering language" and "safety language" — this is a
Vienna Waits for You: Reinventing an Engineering Career
Andrea Zimmerl trained as a plastics engineer in Vienna in the 1990s. Then she became a communication coach, then a life coach, and then — after adopting a reactive rescue dog who barked, lunged, and destroyed half the apartment — a dog trainer.Turns out she wasn't really training the dog. She was training the human on the other end of the leash. In this episode, Olivia catches up with a fellow Vi
Junk the Jargon — Why Engineering Jargon Isn't as Clear as You Think
Becky Paroz has spent 30 years in the Australian construction industry, and she's decoded more badly-translated technical documents than she can count. In this episode, Becky and Olivia talk about why engineering jargon works less like technical precision and more like a members-only badge — and why that becomes a real problem the moment your team includes anyone who didn't grow up inside your spe
007: License to Talk
An engineer once asked Olivia if her fancy podcast microphone was for singing. It's not — it's for you.In this solo episode, Olivia shares the real reason she started English for Engineers in the first place, then walks through five practical ways to master technical English on the job:reading cultural differences correctly, focusing your vocabulary on what you actually need, asking for help witho
Why Logic Alone Can't Hold Your Team Together
Catherine Stagg-Macey has spent the last ten years coaching international tech teams through exactly the kind of friction that comes from mixing cultures, personalities, and one too many assumptions about what "that's interesting" actually means.In this episode, she and Olivia get into why logic alone can't hold a team together, why a South African can get told off for being "too direct" in Englan
Engineering Culture Across Borders
Christian Urich and Olivia went to school together in Austria. Twenty years later, they catch up on how differently engineers actually work once they leave the classroom. Christian's early structural engineering reports were built around pages of calculations, some done entirely by hand — numbers and drawings speaking for themselves.His clients now expect a one-page executive summary before anyone
Lost in Translation, part 2
Last week: why a fast email reply reads as hasty in Japan and a slow one reads as incompetent in Germany. This week, it gets personal.Ama Zbarcea tells the story of a Slovakian colleague who spun around in a quiet London office and shouted "I love you, you're SO rude" — meant as the nicest thing she'd ever heard. We get into why American kids raise their hand high in school and B
Lost in Translation, part 1
A German engineer replies to an email in five minutes. His Japanese counterpart takes a week to answer the same kind of question. Neither one is lazy. They're just working from two completely different rulebooks — and nobody handed either of them a copy of the other's.This week I'm talking to Ama Zbarcea: legal expert, polyglot, and someone who has collected cultural mishaps the way ot
Business vs Technical English
Travis Kalanick once said engineers "don't think a lot about storytelling." I'd like to challenge that — because if you work on international projects, the story you tell in an email or a meeting is the whole job. In this episode, I untangle Business English, Technical English, and Simplified Technical English (yes, that's a real thing, born in 1980s aviation manuals) — three terms that get thrown
Well, hello there engineers
This is the very 1st episode of Olivia's ENGLISH FOR ENGINEERS podcast, where she introduces herself and tells you a little bit about her background in engineering. She's also sharing 4 language learning tips that you can easily introduce into your daily routine. Olivia's mission: helping you master your Business English, Technical English, and conversational skills so that talking English will be
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Stand In The Circle
