In Austria, Christian's structural engineering reports started with a cover page and went straight into pages of calculations, some of them done by hand — pages and pages of them, sometimes measured in meters of paper. Numbers and drawings were expected to speak for themselves; nobody taught him to write persuasively, because "you'll have a secretary for that." Once he moved into environmental consulting for clients across Australia, the expectation flipped completely: every report opens with a one-page executive summary, written for whoever actually has to act on it — often a government client who isn't a subject-matter expert and won't read past page one.

It's less about the country and more about company size, Christian says. A four-person Austrian firm and a 20,000-person Australian consultancy work in completely different ways regardless of where they're based. Scrum and Agile — standard on Dutch infrastructure projects — are barely known among the Austrian and German engineers Olivia works with. Christian's own consultancy is starting to use them too, but only for projects where the client doesn't yet know what the end result should look like.

Fewer flights for one-day client meetings, for one thing — something Christian thinks should have happened before the pandemic forced it. But it's also made professional isolation worse. Without the hallway conversations and coffee breaks, junior engineers especially can go long stretches without knowing what other teams in the same company are even working on.

Talk anyway. Christian's own English "wasn't the greatest either," and what he's found is that people are far more forgiving than engineers expect — colleagues will piece together a broken sentence faster than they'll forgive silence. His advice: don't apologize for your English, and don't let staying quiet be the worst thing you do in a meeting.