Being an engineer is no longer a solitary job of just the man/woman and his/her tools. Even though technical knowledge and experience/skills still count for the most part for the progress of your career, soft skills or social skills are a must have. Most engineers today will have to work at a corporate setting and interact with people from non engineering background.
- Interactive Skills : This essentially means social skills, etiquettes that we use to interact or mingle with each other. Tech engineers are no longer lone wolves, cooped up in their cubicle, coding away. Nowadays most of the assignments consist of teamwork. Unless you have passable soft skills you will not be able to succeed at team work. Many engineers who are used to working by themselves are in general not very adept at teamwork. Learning to be a team player actually has its benefits as it reduces workload and can make workplace become more fun!
- Communication : Most engineers are too caught up with technical jargons to improve themselves at communication. A good engineer however is not just one who has tech skills, but can also communicate it effectively, especially to lay or non tech people.
- Empathy : Most engineers are so engrossed with technical nittie gritties of the product they are creating they often forget who it’s being made for – the customers. An ideal engineer typically never forgets the word customer interface/usability from his mind. The main purpose of engineering is to solve problems and make life easier for non tech people – in this instance the customers.
- Continuous Hunger For Learning : The Engineering profession is anything but stagnant. This is because the engineering sector is based on technology which is always changing, always evolving. So if you are not keeping yourself abreast of the latest developments of your sector, and learning new tech skills accordingly you will be lagging behind.
