Engineering Soft Skills vs. Engineering Entrepreneurial Skills

摘要

Soft skills, like communication and teamwork, are vitally important for an engineer's success in the workplace. Despite this, there is a perceived shortage of soft skills among engineers, particularly engineers of the youngest generational cohorts, the Millennials. This paper aims to evaluate the overlap between soft skills and the more concrete and the more enthusing category, entrepreneurial skills. An exploration of the literature reveals commonalities between soft and entrepreneurial skills and highlights the effects of the terminology differences on different generational cohorts. The paper concludes with five literature-supported assumptions about the current state of soft skills in engineering and how improvements can be made by rebranding soft skills as entrepreneurial skills.