Dr. Çetiner’s Blogs (Dr. Beytullah Gültekin Çetiner)

Did you graduate from your engineering college and find a good job? Congratulations! But are you really prepared to work as a good engineer? Many newbie engineers will be shocked when they first start their careers. Many of these new engineers will see that a lot of skills required from them are not available and they had no courses in their engineering college to learn those skills. These skills are called soft skills. Even in courses such as engineering management, the curriculum cannot cover all these subjects due to time constraint. Therefore, there are many courses outside the university for career development purposes for engineers.

So what are these important soft skills? Actualy each of these soft skills is a different topic for a seminar. I will just give the names of these soft skills and talk later about each in detail. These soft skills are namely communicational (or interpersonal skills) including reading, listening and writing in an effective and efficient manner, speaking in public, negotiation skills, change management skills, soft decision making skills, organizing and having effective meetings (SMART meetings).

As engineers, you will start your career as a first level manager, you must be well prepared for technical skills required for engineering jobs usually different than what you learnt in engineering school. You must be also equipped with time management and stress management skills.

Bad thing about the workplace is that in school, your teachers give their feedbacks as grades for your activities but who will give useful feedbacks in your career?

As engineering students, you must be well-prepared for these requirements and think about how to acquire them from now.