The Perception of Organizational Psychologists on the Importance of Soft Skills for Engineers

Abstract

Soft skills are very important in the job market, as they are closely related to interpersonal interactions and well as other factors such as problem-solving. Despite their importance, in some technical fields like Engineering, they tend to be taken for granted. Organizational psychologists are the ones usually involved in hiring process within companies. Therefore, the presented work assessed the most important aspects necessary to build these skills based on organizational psychologists’ perspectives. Important soft skills previously identified as important for Engineers through a Systematic Bibliographic Review were grouped into core groups. These were used as a basis to elaborate a questionnaire used to evaluate the organizational psychologists’ perception of each soft skill in terms of Engineering performance. The results support the idea that soft skills are important for the professional performance of Engineer and are directly linked to the multidisciplinary feature of the field. The results also suggest the urgent need to increase the exchange between market and academia and reshape the Engineering curricula to reflect the demands of an increasingly challenging and competitive job market.