From the course: Tech Career Skills: Searching, Interviewing, and Landing a Job
Join today to access over 22,700 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.
The struggle for soft skills
From the course: Tech Career Skills: Searching, Interviewing, and Landing a Job
The struggle for soft skills
- During my college days, a visiting stand-up comedian once joked, "If an engineer's social skills were a person, "that person would be shorter than a pygmy." The audience, made up mostly of non-engineers laughed loudly. I have shaped my entire career to disprove such stereotypes, but is it really true that engineers lack soft skills or am I just repeating a stereotype? The truth is somewhere between those two extremes. First, if you struggle with some of these soft skills, don't blame yourself. Our society and education systems are creating one-dimensional and siloed experiences. I've advised several engineering programs in how to produce engineers that are more workforce ready. The goal is to not produce order-takers, but thoughtful collaborators and entrepreneurs. Most academic programs have common flaws. Solo assignments to test technical skills deprive engineers of collaboration opportunities. This also means that engineers lose out on frank exchanges and debates, which are very…
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.