The Case for Soft Skills in a STEM Field
Why Soft Skills When I’m in a STEM Role?
My engineering job is all about math and science. I deal with numbers, why worry about the words? The equations and algebra are what define the work that I do, why should I worry about grammar? If you’re in a STEM field, it’s more than likely you got there because you excelled at science and math classes. If you’re currently a student, you may find yourself headed toward STEM fields simply because you don’t like your English or language arts classes. While science and math certainly are the backbone of all STEM fields, the reality is that soft skills are still critical components to the success of any good engineer, scientist, or mathematician.
Writing
One of the biggest complaints from students interested in STEM is the latest essay they have to write. “Why do I need to write an essay?”, they think to themselves. I just want to write my code, design this gadget, or solve this equation. While the individual tasks of any STEM profession may be isolated to math and science skill sets, a design or scientific discovery won’t get beyond the lab or the engineer’s notebook until they are shared with others. And that requires written and verbal communication. Believe it or not, the first person you need to communicate with is yourself.
Clear Writing is Clear Thinking
Any good scientist or engineer needs to keep their work organized. They may have designs and experiments running through their head constantly, but it’s more than likely that until they put those ideas to the page, they will never be fully formed and coherent. Writing forces us to organize our thoughts. What was a jumbled mess in our heads suddenly has order. It may not yet be cogent and clear to even those who produced them just moments before, but with words on a page, they are free to cut and paste, dissect, revise, rewrite, re-order, massage, fine-tune, hone, sharpen, or otherwise improve until the right message is there.
Informal Documentation
No matter what project you undertake, there will be more information to keep track of than you can contain in your head. The best thing you can do it to write it all down. This can be extremely informal, like in your own notebook, Excel spreadsheets/Matlab code with calculations, or PowerPoint presentations with diagrams of how your prototypes and designs work. It’s extremely wise and helpful to periodically clean up this informal documentation so that if someone other than yourself were to read it, they could make some sense of it. If you change projects or leave a company, it’s one way to make sure your work doesn’t go to waste. Also, it’s not uncommon to revisit your work even six months after you worked on it, and feel like it belongs to a completely different person. The thought processes and logic you followed not long ago may not be the same you follow today. Putting in a small amount of effort to make this documentation comprehensible can save a world of pain when you suddenly find that work useful again.
Whether you like it or not, we live in a world of email. It is the number one form of communication outside of in-person or virtual meetings. You will constantly be tasked with explaining the work you are doing, advocating for the path you think is best, or outlining why someone else’s idea is less than ideal—to put it nicely. If you can’t write these emails clearly, persuasively, and without being inflammatory, you will not be effective at your job—regardless of what that job is.
Powerpoint/Presentations
If you’re in any kind of corporate environment, you’ll find yourself making PowerPoint presentations, and likely a lot of them. In many ways, they are a less-than-ideal form of communication. Theoretically, they are intended to be accompanied by verbal explanations of the content and the written or visual content is only meant to be a supplement. However, these presentations are commonly archived as a history of project progress and need to be intelligible without the narration of a presenter. Striking this balance of using the slides to write down the salient points while still allowing room for a complimentary verbal presentation can be very difficult. It’s a skill that must be practiced and honed to perfection.
Formal Documentation
Depending on the type of industry you find yourself in, you will be involved in writing more formal documents. These could be submissions to government agencies for approval of your product for use by the general public, it could be a grant to receive financial backing to support the research you are interested in pursuing. Either way, the successful launch of your product or the chances for your research to get off the ground are all hinging on the persuasiveness and clarity of your writing. If you’re unable to convince your audience that your product is safe and effective, or that your research is worth funding, you’ll be frustrated time and again.
Reading
The inverse of all the previous scenarios is that as much as you may write for yourself or others, you will do even more reading of others’ writing. You will go through others’ informal documentation, emails, presentations, and formal reports looking for relevant information or to understand a new project or the latest problem your team is facing. If you aren’t able to read quickly, and with a high level of understanding of the technical topics you deal with on a daily basis in a STEM field, you will not be able to perform well in your role.
Persuasion, Debate, and Negotiation
In conjunction with the writing and reading skills necessary to perform your job at a peak level, you will also need to be persuasive in a spoken setting. You may think that only managers or executives need to defend their work battle-royale style in a room with others trying to promote their own path as the prime opportunity for the organization. If so, you’d be wrong. Even the most junior employee will need to defend their work, decisions, and approach to their own team members and boss at the very least. More than likely, you’ll be called on to share the case for your decisions with a broader group.
Perhaps most critically, these skills will directly impact your ability to grow in your career. If you cannot communicate the value you bring to your own manager, you will never get that promotion or the raise you’re wanting. Your boss will not be able to advocate for you if you cannot persuade and at times, debate or negotiate the dollar value you should receive in return for the work you do. If you can’t do this well, you will be leaving something on the table. While your work should speak for itself, the bottom line is that there is no one better suited to promoting your own contributions than you are.
If you are in management then the need is all the more important. Your ability to debate topics and negotiate skillfully will directly impact the funding your team receives, the raises your employees get, and the credit you and your team get for jobs well done.
PowerPoint
Your presentation skills will be another factor in your ability to make an impression wherever you work. Invariably, presentations to an audience are one of the most common ways you will pitch a project, a change in process, or virtually any improvement to your workplace arrangement. In this post-pandemic reality, those presentations will likely be done virtually over a video conferencing software like zoom. While you may be less concerned with what to do with your hands while you present, there are still a host of soft skills associated with making a good presentation that will be critical in affecting the outcome you want.
Don’t Ignore the Soft Skills
If you want to make an impact, if you want to be a better scientist or engineer, if you don’t want to be left behind, then soft skills like strong writing, excellent reading comprehension, and oral presentation and persuasion are critical to your success. If you’re tempted to blow off your English classes because you want to go into STEM, you might want to think twice!
