The Rising Demand for Soft Skills in Engineering | LinkedIn’s VPE Aarathi Vidyasagar

**Aarathi Vidyasagar** (0:00)
Soft skills have been something that's important throughout. I mean, it's not new, but with the onset of generative AI and coming in and taking away some of the mundane, how do you differentiate yourself? So as an engineer, you've got to bring things that are not easily applicable. And so things like communication, leadership, soft skills become even more important. They've always been important. Like if you look at success criteria, if you look at leaders in the industry today, you would see that a lot of it has to do with communication. Leadership, like soft skills, do play a big role in terms of growth, etc. Some of the other skills that kind of help you stand out might be easily applicable now with generative AI and the tech changes that are coming in.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:45)
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**Aarathi Vidyasagar** (1:30)
Thank you for having me excited to have this conversation.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:33)
You've got some really interesting perspectives that you're bringing, and according to new data recently released by LinkedIn, the demand for soft skills among engineers is on the rise. Something you and I have talked about a little bit, in this six-month period from 2022 to 2023 across the US, UK, and India markets, communication was consistently in the top five for skills gaining the most share in demand. And at the same time, I know there's a previous LinkedIn study that found that engineers with strong soft skills are promoted 13 percent faster than those with only technical skills. And we've seen this even continue to rise in importance, as this is happening with the backdrop of GenAI's transformation of software development. Do you think that these industry changes are helping drive the desire for communication and other soft skills among engineers?

**Aarathi Vidyasagar** (2:21)
I think I want to start with community soft skills have been something that's important throughout. I mean, it's not new, but with the onset of generative AI and coming in and taking away some of the mundane, like coding, et cetera, it's how do you differentiate yourself. So as an engineer, you've got to bring things that are not easily applicable. And so things like communication, leadership, soft skills become even more important. They've always been important. Like if you look at success criteria, if you look at leaders in the industry today, you would see that a lot of it has to do with communication. Leadership, like the soft skills, do play a big role in terms of growth, et cetera. But now it's just ever more important. Like going back to our mathematical theorem, while it was sufficient once upon a time, I think it becomes necessary now with the changes that are coming in because some of the other skills that kind of helped you stand out might be easily applicable now with generative AI and the tech changes that are coming in.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:24)
And we've had variations of this conversation here on Dev Interrupted before. Our listeners may be kind of groaning hearing me talk about communication. They're like, oh, every leader who's really good at their job talks about the importance of communication. I think the difference here is LinkedIn has this massive pool of data to back this up and say, look, we can actually look at the job market and say, this is something that's highly valued. This is something that is increasing importance, and it aligns, to your point, to these transformational shifts that are happening and how software development works today.

**Aarathi Vidyasagar** (3:53)
Yeah. I think, look, LinkedIn has been doing this whole skill-based hiring, understanding skills, mapping skills. This has been a journey that's not started just because of the generative AI movement. But now that it's happened, us having this information and this breakdown just makes it even more important to see where the trends go. What are the trends that people are looking at? What skills are most important here? How do we begin to differentiate? This is where we as engineering leaders have to come together, start looking at what we now call as talent map, a skills map to see what those gaps are, what those trends are, and where do we need to go. So I think it's super important to know that soft skills, again, not easily applicable.