Prompting for engineers

Three questions usually come up before booking: is the course for us, what does the day cover and what will we be able to do afterwards?

1. Who the course is for

   • Designers, engineers and project managers
   • Anyone who regularly writes reports, meeting minutes or documentation
   • Requires the fundamentals course or equivalent experience

   Why practise?: The same task can produce a useful or a useless result depending on how it is worded. This is a technique you can learn, with a few clear rules.

   Why use your own templates?: Your structure, tone and standards matter. Practising with a generic report does not reproduce them.

2. What the course covers

   • Why one question produces two different answers. How the different parts of an instruction influence the result. 45 minutes.
   • The four parts of a good instruction. Source, format, scope and tone: what happens when one is missing. 60 minutes.
   • Practical exercise I: your own report section. Everyone works on one of their own tasks. 90 minutes.
   • Assess the result before correcting it. A two-minute check of whether a result is reliable. 60 minutes.
   • Practical exercise II: meeting minutes and documentation. Two further exercises with your own templates. 90 minutes.
   • A collection you can keep. The usable prompts developed during the day are yours to take away. 45 minutes.

3. What you will be able to do

   • Set tasks with a clear source, format, scope and tone
   • Assess the quality of a result in two minutes
   • Identify whether a poor result comes from the instruction or the documents
   • Record prompts for recurring tasks
   • Make templates usable by assistants