From Geek to Star #12 - Soft Skills are not just about communication

If you missed the previous episodes, you can access them online here.

🗓️ This Week – Episode 12: AI will make things harder, so let's soften up our skills

This week, I've been watching a number of thought leaders in AI and the more I was watching them, the more I was thinking “that's crazy, technology is really evolving at an exponential rate and keeping up is tough”. In edition #7 of this newsletter, we touched upon the importance of communication as an essential soft skill to positively show your impact and differentiate itself. 

You will agree that this is not the only soft skill to grow to be able to thrive as a T++ engineer. So what are the other soft skills that we should look at and work on?

🎢 “The future of jobs” report by the World Economic Forum

This week, we will take a bit of time to analyze an annual report made by the World Economic Forum since 2016 on what the future of jobs looks like. For the 2025 edition, the AI impact on jobs and skills was taken into account, although it remains challenging to assess precisely its impact. This report, that you can access freely here, is not specific to us in tech engineering but it is interesting to see the trends and derive them into our domains. 

By 2030, the core skills that companies forecast being the most important ones can be seen in this graph: 

The good news is that some top core skills are more naturally present among tech engineers than for other occupations: AI and big data, technological literacy, analytical thinking and systems thinking. Skills that we still need to work on but that we can develop more naturally given our nature and our education. 

In the soft skills which are predicted to become increasingly important, we see in the graph: 

• Resilience, flexibility and agility, 

• Curiosity and lifelong learning, 

• Leadership and social influence, 

• Talent management 

• and Motivation and self-awareness. 

📝 Applying the learnings to our engineering career path

As well summarised in the report, to be fully ready for 2030, “skills that reflect the important role of technical proficiency, strong interpersonal abilities, emotional intelligence, and a commitment to continuous learning demonstrate respondents’ expectation that workers must balance hard and soft skills to thrive in today’s work environments.”

The interpersonal abilities and emotional intelligence are key elements to focus on particularly as engineers, as they may be less natural to develop. But now you see what employers will be expecting from their workforce, whether they are engineers or not. Let's not think that they will consider than just the hard skills are enough because we are engineers.

📍 Your Actions This Week

If interpersonal abilities and emotional intelligence is an area you don't feel particularly comfortable about, especially with people who are not in tech, you can start with a small step: 

• List 5 people  in your professional context who are not in engineering and that you appreciate. They may be from sales, marketing, customer service, finance…, working directly with you on a project or not, but you know them well enough to engage in conversations with them without feeling awkward. 

• Plan in your agenda to have a 1-1 catch-up with one of them per week to see how things are going in their life and at work. 

• Over time, as you meet each of them every 5-6 weeks, this will build you a first base upon which you can start to grow your skills.

🙏 I’d Love to Hear From You

What’s one real-world experience that looking back made you step up in your career?

Reply to this email, I read every note.

And don’t forget: follow me on LinkedIn for more reflections and “behind-the-scenes” thinking between newsletters. Don't hesitate to engage discussions there in the comments to also start showing and sharing your thoughts publicly. 

✨ Stay curious, stay connected!

From Geek to Star by Khang | The Way Forward