Importance of soft skills

The semiconductor industry in general demands two special skills in every engineer. One of these skills is more trivial, that being the technical know-how and ability to grasp requirements & specifications. The other one is soft skills. The first one is mainly used to perform the required verification duties at work, and second one helps in planning an approach to solve the impending issues or problems. The bottom line is that a good engineer will have a blend of both technical and soft skills.

Technical skills are more profound in people with greater hands on experience. Needless to say, the more adventurous you are to dive deep and the more complex your targets are, the more you learn and this is where you really add value. Technical skills will eventually teach you how to meet these expectations.

Soft skills are the ones that define an engineer’s approach towards work and life and in most cases define stress that is more individual specific. Soft skills are actually people or inter-personnel skills. The best part about mastering it is that the application of these skills is not limited to one's profession, but their scope reaches beyond. Soft skills teach one to succeed, and to exceed expectations. There are situations that we come across during our day-to-day work life as a design or verification engineer in which one person performs better than the others just on the basis of Soft skills - be it winning an argument with someone on the basis of his/her communication or finding/handling multiple tasks effectively because of superior organizational abilities.

Soft skills are extremely important for engineers and this is something that is often overlooked. It is surprising that we spend most of our time educating almost exclusively in technical skills while thinking you are good at soft skills.

Our reactions in a complex setting vary widely with situations, emotions, requirements, time, belief, knowledge and expertise. Being such complex, a normal human being will be no exception at a work place where the stakes are very high. Therefore the quality of a job done by an engineer is directly proportional to his or her psychological maturity and profoundness acquired, adopted and developed with age and experience. be able to learn them.