Employment Guide: Ballo: STEM majors: Don’t neglect your “soft skills”

This summer I had an IT internship with a Fortune 500 company. At the conclusion of the internship, I had to give a presentation to an entire room of analysts, engineers and executives, including the CIO. I had to explain my contributions, effectively justifying my salary for the past three months, and make a convincing case for why they should hire me full-time. Does that sound like a situation for which your coursework has adequately prepared you?

If you’re a student in a STEM discipline — science, technology, engineering or mathematics — your program is probably designed to develop your “hard” skills. You’ve gained some concrete technical ability, the kind of expertise that might appear on your resumé: knowledge of a process, a software or a methodology. Maybe you’ve even earned a professional certification. But what your program doesn’t teach you is the “soft” skills: those intangible, personality-specific skills that leaders, team players, negotiators and mediators possess. Soft skills include positive attitude, good organization, effective communication and general agreeability. Skills such as these are difficult to quantify on a resumé but are weighed heavily during the interview process.

It’s no secret that employers greatly value soft skills. Survey data has supported this for decades. A recent study by the Seattle Jobs Initiative found that 75 percent of employers consider soft skills to be as important as — or more important than — technical skills. A lack of soft skills is also cited as the primary reason technical projects fail. 

Moreover, our evaluation of someone’s competence is based on our perception of them, on how they appear — not on reality. Say there are two equally qualified and knowledgeable people presenting on the same complex topic. One individual can’t effectively explain the topic in terms the audience can comprehend, though the other is eloquent, captivating and clear. We automatically assume the latter individual is more competent or has more expertise, although he might just be better at pitching the same idea. Presentations and interviews are no different.

For STEM students, soft skills are often as elusive as they are intangible. One problem is that they aren’t taken seriously when they do appear in the curriculum.

Yes, we’re forced to take liberal arts classes. But writing a few essays for a general education requirement class does not make you Shakespeare, and not many of us really apply ourselves to humanities classes in the first place. 

Yes, we’re forced to do group projects. Ideally, a group effort would teach us about leadership and collaboration, simulating teamwork in the professional world. But in reality, the workload isn’t distributed fairly, it’s nearly impossible to set meeting times that work for everyone’s schedules, and the whole ordeal is often more frustrating than rewarding.

Yes, we’re forced to give presentations. But when is the last time you watched a peer give a captivating presentation for a class assignment? How about the last time you gave a passionate speech from the podium of a classroom? Most of the time we’re either slumped in boredom and counting down the minutes or sitting nervously and dreading having to go next.

The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough opportunities to develop soft skills. Humanities classes, group projects and presentations are all legitimate means to build these skills. The problem is that we STEM students often treat soft skills as superfluous or just assume that we’re already good enough in this area. The former mindset is deluded, the latter is ignorant. We need to develop soft skills with the same rigorous approach and attention to detail that we apply to hard skills, and there is always room to improve.

How do we define rigorous improvement? One approach is formal training. The communication department at Pitt offers introductory and advanced courses in public speaking. Having taken one, I can assure you that studying the theory behind effective communication and then applying it to several speeches is much different than doing a final presentation in a technical class.

If you don’t have room in your schedule for another course, practical experience is a great alternative. Toastmasters International is well-known group dedicated to developing skilled speakers and leaders. There are several local Toastmasters chapters, with ones at Pitt and CMU both meeting regularly. Members can give speeches on topics of choice, receive feedback and progress along a certification track.

If neither of those are feasible for you, Pitt now offers a student subscription to Lynda.com, a site containing quality video instruction on several topics, including soft skills for business. Whatever your method, you need to have a conscious and structured approach to developing your soft skills. Science and technology advance rapidly, and many of today’s coveted hard skills might be obsolete tomorrow. But soft skills will remain transferable from job to job and essential throughout your entire career. 

Write Tiemoko at tib14@pitt.edu.