Nowadays, soft skills are an essential part of professional life. While hard skills represent technical skills, soft skills are all about personal skills, such as team spirit, creativity, or leadership. Students and graduates need to identify their soft skills for the hiring process.
Schools of Engineering like ESILV put soft skills at the core of their programmes with transversal projects to help students having a better understanding of themselves.
Capacity to adapt
Engineers must be able to adapt to any situations they might encounter. Indeed, the engineering industry gathers a large number of professions with various types of missions. Many engineers can testify that routine is not really a problem in their job, as every mission is different from the other and requires a specific solution linked to a unique goal. Besides, engineers may intervene in different environments, from aerospatial to robotics.
Discipline
A skill that is particularly appreciated by recruiters. Whether they are working on a machine on a code, engineers have to be extremely meticulous and to strive for perfection to avoid any type of dangerous complication. However, it doesn’t mean that they can’t be creative, but to explore new possibilities, the first step is to make sure every detail is set.
Creativity
An engineer is, first and foremost, an innovator. Someone who is able to invent and create new concepts and new ways to fix problems. A good engineer must be a true visionary, able to predict what people will need in the future to outstrip their demands.
Fast Learning Capacity
This skill might be the most important for engineers, for the simple reason that they will be led to grow and learn along with their projects. A recruiter will be more inclined to hire a young engineer that is eager to learn new pieces of information and skills, and that can listen and learn from more experienced colleagues than a competent candidate that never question themselves and that never listen.
