What are the crucial "soft skills" an engineer requires?

Hello Frint,

This is a great question to be thinking about.  Soft skills are extremely valuable, and are often overlooked.  

My top soft skills that I use are below:

Public Speaking - you might give a lot of presentations as an engineer (depending on your role) and your audience can vary a lot.  Make sure you can accommodate both technical and non technical audiences.

People Reading - what I mean by this is the ability to read the body language and emotions of others.  This comes in handy when you can see if they respond well or poorly to something and adjust accordingly.

Authenticity - this is basically just learning to be yourself and not trying to oversell yourself in situations.  People are drawn to others that make them feel like there's trust established.

Teamwork/Leadership - working in a team or leading a team is likely to be apart of your job as an engineer.  As a team member, you'll have to be able to collaborate and work with others and as a leader you'll have to learn how to leverage your team's strengths and what motivates them.

I have several presentations (in power point form) that cover some of these topics, and others, that I'd be willing to share with you.  Let me know if you're interested and I can pass them along.

As far as other skills go, I think the rarity of the various skills depends on what your intended major is.  Coding, even basic knowledge, will be helpful in almost any engineering major and is often uncommon in non software/directly computer related majors.  Honestly, the skill that I've found most valuable in my current role is being able to explain technical topics in a non technical way.  Also, knowing how to listen and genuinely take in information that is given to you, even if it is given by someone without a degree, is extremely important.

Feel free to reach out if you have any other questions!