I'm *this* close to cold emailing my husband's company's IT department and offering my services.

Every day I have to hear him complain about how these highly technical folks aren't effective communicators. They don't communicate clearly and come across as very aggressive.

I asked him to describe the problem and he says they push back a lot (they get requests for things that don't fall under their purview), and when they *do* have a solution, the way they phrase things makes no sense. He says he has to decipher their meaning.

TBH, I empathize.

On my eng team, we frequently field requests that we don't handle. But directing people is a part of our job. They don't know where to do, so they come to you, so you have to direct them and do it in a way that's clear and helpful.

Then there's a matter of translating low-level IT or engineering concepts into plain English (English being the language we use for business) and giving business stakeholders only enough of that info so their eyes don't gloss over. It's a tricky balance.

If you're on an IT/engineering team and frequently have to interface with internal clients and stakeholders, you have to "translate" all the time and often under pressure. You have to give them just enough context to help them comprehend the problem w/o losing them.

No one tells you this when you're in IT I imagine (NO ONE told me this when I went into technical program management) but: rephrasing the problem in business, plain English terms will help you a LOT. Only give more detail if asked & always in a way the SH will care about.

Most SHs come to you when they're stuck or need something urgently. They don't have the time or the patience to talk about the low-level stuff.

Write up some canned responses to commonly asked questions & save them as templates. Copy/paste as needed.

Chances are you'll be encountering the same, or similar, types of questions. If you're not the person to go to about X, make sure you know who the right person is. Make it your business to find these things out & document them so you don't have to do as much digging/info recall.

I find that I have to repeat myself a lot. Since I know this to be the case, I document whatever I can and adjust the tone/message for whoever I'm sending it to. Anyway, this has helped me quite a bit. I hope this helps!