In today's working world, knowledge and experience are no longer enough to get a job. As an engineer you probably have many ideas for innovation. You must be able to present these ideas to an audience, communicate effectively with the team you will be working with, be able to effectively solve the problems you will encounter, adapt to unexpected situations... As opposed to hard-skills, these skills are called soft-skills and can be defined as "people" skills. These will help you to grow professionally and personally.

Soft skills are useful in everyday life. Your interactions with people require, for example, good communication skills.

Here are the 10 most important soft skills according to Forbes:

1. empathy : helps to understand people and situations but also to build trust and connect more effectively with others
2. ability to influence peers: getting things done usually require work of other people
3. emotional intelligence: ability to asses and manage your own emotions to be more effective in your work and in your relation with others
4. curiosity : don't stay on your feet, you can always learn more and stand out
5. active listening: better understand what you are being told in order to work more effectively
6. humility: it does not mean considering oneself as inferior but being able to perceive oneself, one's skills and knowledge and those of others in a realistic way
7. communication skills: it includes many aspects, including the ability to express oneself clearly and be understood and to be able to listen.
8. creative problem-solving: it shows your ability to adapt and react correctly to an unknown situation.
9. resilience: set yourself up for success by being committed to your choices and then seeing them through.
10. observation skills: . learn to see behind the words, to detect behaviors and patterns and thus develops the ability to see problems before they happen.

Learning to develop soft skills is even more important for engineering students because, unlike a business school for example, few group or company work is encouraged. This prevents the development of skills that are essential to work in companies.

Olin College of Engineering, a college in Massachusetts, has decided to help its students to develop their soft skills. In that video Greg Marra confides "you have a problem that you have no idea how to solve and it is up to you and your team to figure out what does success looks like". This builds self-confidence, and students are then convinced that they are able to think and solve problems regardless of whether it concerns a subject they are familiar with or not.