SKILLS SPECIAL..... Top 5 Must-Have Soft Skills for Professional Engineers

Top 5 Must-Have Soft Skills for Professional Engineers

Technical skills alone are insufficient for engineering professional engineers’ career success. “Soft skills” play very important role in differentiating engineers during employment and during career development.

In the daily work of engineers and technical specialists, soft skills are as important as technical skills. These skills, or emotional intelligence, are often not learned in school and enable professionals to navigate smoothly and effectively through a wide variety of social and professional situations with a wide variety of people. Such skills include communication, cooperation, creativity, leadership, and organization.

A lot of studies discussed the must have soft skills for employers, with 98 percent of them saying communication skills are essential and 92 percent teamwork skills. Following are five key soft skills that engineers and other professionals should develop for career success.

Soft Skill 1: Communication

In everyday actions of speaking, writing, and listening, many professionals underestimate the importance of communication skills. Engineers tend to prioritize technical skills over communication skills, not realizing that they cannot be fully effective in their jobs if they are inadequate speakers, writers, and listeners. Yet it is particularly in the engineering fields that effective communication skills are crucial to success.

The interaction between stakeholders, whether it is internal in an organization or external with partners or clients, is fraught with opportunities for misunderstanding. That is why effective communication also involves listening, which is itself an essential soft skill. Without actively listening to customers, clients, or project partners, problem-solving becomes much more difficult and time-consuming.

Soft Skill 2: Creativity

Creativity is the driving force behind innovation and therefore increasingly gaining recognition in uncertain and challenging economic times. Innovation thrives on breakthrough thinking, nimbleness, and empowerment. Organizations often depend on big ideas and creative employees to develop innovative products and services.

Every engineer’s core mission is to try to improve the utility of things, to design products or processes that will solve problems better, faster and cheaper. This mission would rarely be achieved if not for engineers’ ways of thinking, which often lead to problem-solving opportunities that would otherwise remain hidden.

In the engineering fields, creativity can be as valuable to solving a problem as the technical skills to identify and troubleshoot the source of the problem. As such, creative thinking is a soft skill that engineers, scientists, and others should cultivate in order to become invaluable members of their organizations.

Soft Skill 3: Adaptability

There is no shortage of challenges and issues that arise on any given workday. Having the ability to identify solutions to unforeseen problems requires being able to modify and adjust accordingly to the environment and situation.

This flexibility is one of the soft skills that increasingly more employers look for in employees. The way professionals demonstrate their adaptability is by showing they are able to think on their feet, assess problems, and find solutions. The ability to develop a well-thought-out solution within a given time is a skill that employers value greatly.

At the same time, today’s tech frontier is rapidly reshaping industries, which means that organizations often must implement change internally to keep up. Here, adaptability also means a willingness to face the unexpected.

Soft Skill 4: Collaboration

Whether you call it cooperation, collaboration, or teamwork, an engineer’s ability to work with other people from different backgrounds is essential.

You can ask yourself the following questions and think about the answers

“What would be the likelihood of success if team members could not communicate together?”, “What if they could not share responsibilities and accountability in working as a team?”, What if there was no leadership present in the project?”

Soft Skill 5: Leadership

Leadership, in and of itself, is not one skill but the blending and integration of a variety of skills. By its very nature, leading people is about successfully interacting with them and convincing them to follow. This makes leadership a key soft skill for professionals who intend to make a difference.

In an engineering context, leadership incorporates a number of capabilities which are critical in order to function at a professional level, those capabilities include the ability to assess risk and take initiative, the willingness to make decisions in the face of uncertainty, a sense of urgency and the will to deliver on time in the face of constraints or obstacles, resourcefulness and flexibility, trust and loyalty in a team setting, and the ability to relate to others.

While much of leadership is character-based, engineers can develop or hone certain leadership skills or attributes to foster personal and professional success.

At the end I believe that career success and the passion of adding value need a specific inner personal values as being agile, innovative, efficient, value driven and cooperative person. This will result in a working culture that brings the energy, embraces team work, seeks for excellence and exceeds expectations.

Magdy Aly