knowledging

Soft Skills Engineering

It’s not software engineering. It’s soft skills engineering.

Background

Soft Skills are Undervalued

Let’s be clear. Soft skills are undervalued. Here are a few examples:

• They are thought to be used by managers or above, and not by engineers.
• They often seem too “business-like”, lacking technical and tangible aspects, which can lead engineers to disdain them.
• Only a small subset of what constitutes soft skills is considered, leaving important ones underutilized, such as:
  • Creative Thinking
  • Task Management
  • Asynchronous Communication
  • Information Dissemination, Sharing, and Transparency
  • Plain Text and Markdown

In a VUCA, DEIB, and AI-Driven Era, Soft Skills Matter

We live in challenging times.

• We are in a VUCA era, characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
• It’s also the era of DEIB, where our standard of living and basic literacy levels have improved. Ignoring this can lead to becoming an “unpreferred organization”.
• Needless to say, AI is on the rise. The bottleneck in engineering and projects is us humans.

In such challenging times, soft skills become essential.

Take, for instance, the time spent “waiting for AI outputs” after leveraging them. How are you spending that time?

Abstractly speaking, you’re like a manager overseeing dozens of AI team members. How do you prioritize tasks confirmation and additional requests for these AI? You also need to be inventive about how you switch gears and take breaks. How do you manage that? — Much of this can be alleviated by using “task management”, a kind of soft skill.

However, the genre of task management hasn’t even been properly explored. You likely haven’t heard of it either. I’m not talking about project task management. I’m referring to “personal task management”, where you manage your tasks independently.

Soft Skills Engineering

With the growing importance of soft skills, I propose a new engineering genre.

Soft Skills Engineering, abbreviated as SSE.

In SSE, we engage in the following:

• Learning, catching up with, and organizing soft skills
• Customizing soft skills
  • Slightly modifying existing soft skills to fit the company, team, or individual better
• Developing soft skills
  • Creating new soft skills
• Organizing soft skills context
  • We call the current usage and stance of soft skills within a company, team, or individual as the soft skills context

Pay attention to the emphasis. We modify the soft skills themselves, create new ones, and investigate their usage context (the entity that actually uses the skills). SSE is a specialized endeavor. Just as software engineers deal with software and engineering managers deal with organizations and people, soft skills engineers deal with soft skills.

I am a Soft Skills Engineer

Now, I am a soft skills engineer.

While I usually label myself as a Knowledge Architect, this concept is complex and not very relatable, making it hard to understand. Realizing that the notion of soft skills is more easily communicated, I plan to present myself as a soft skills engineer moving forward.

Please Take a Look at My Work

As an example of SSE, here are some soft skills I have developed:

• The soft skills I’ve created are shared daily on my DEV Community blog
  • https://dev.to/stakiran
• They are also available on GitHub Pages
  • https://stakiran.github.io/knowledging/

Conclusion

I believe the importance of soft skills is increasing. I have presented the idea of soft skills engineering here.

I encourage you all to engage with and reflect on soft skills. While relying on generative AI is an option, the truth is that AI only covers a small fraction of soft skills and lacks intricacy. This is why soft skills engineers are essential. If you need help, feel free to rely on me.

See you next time.