Manuel Campo Vidal: A Great Conference!

As I said a few minutes ago in my last post, I forgot to tell you about how this Monday's conference about flexibility went (see my post: "Flexibility and adaptability").

Last Monday (15th April) Manuel Campo Vidal held a conference at the UEM about the importance of flexibility. He spoke in a way which was really easy to follow, making the topic very interesting, drawing our attention at every moment and giving a great example of the communication skills we should all have.

In addition, he talked about important topics we will need to embrace in order to achieve a better professional future. Between the most important ideas that were said in this conference I would highlight the following:

You need to be able to adapt to the society's needs and you shouldn't be afraid of moving away from your hometown, in fact you should move nationally and internationally and have a global vision of the world. Flexibility is one of the most important things you must have if you want to succeed.

In addition, knowing how to communicate well with others is essential, because the people who succeed (unfortunately) aren't those who do the best work, but the ones who actually know how to explain well their work and how to make it attractive. He also told us that we should get rid of the idea that an engineer doesn't know how to explain himself because it's totally false. In fact, Manuel Campo Vidal studied engineering and he showed in this conference that his communication skills are absolutely great.

Another important idea to take into account is the importance of having different visions from different disciplines because that's what the society asks us to have. We are engineers (in my classmates' and my case) but we also need to know a bit about other fields, such as economics or environmental science for example. Teamwork and entrepreneurship are also really important aspects we should assume.

According to the communication skills part, he gave us some tips, such as getting to know the people you are going to talk to before holding a conference or a similar situation, or saying the most important ideas at the beginning and at the end of a talk (because people usually tend to forget the middle parts). He also showed us a really interesting video which displays an example of how an effective conference should be done. The video shows the different communication tools that Al Gore uses in a conference he held about climate change. It was really interesting.