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Academic Life - Transversal Skills

FEUP promotes initiatives that complement technical education and enable students to meet the demands of the labour market.

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The importance of soft skills for employability

Soft skills are fundamental to a successful career, as they are the basis for the ability to find the most appropriate responses to the demanding challenges that arise in a professional context. They go beyond disciplinary knowledge and do not refer specifically to the technical or scientific nature of engineering in the curricula (hard skills), but above all to a set of skills of a more generic or transversal nature (soft skills) that enhance and promote the personal development of students and their professional skills when transferable to the workplace.

Some examples include communication skills, critical thinking, entrepreneurship and ethics/deontology and responsibility, among others. As well as bringing study plans into line with the latest educational quality standards, these skills can provide students with better strategies for dealing with the daily constraints of their academic career, increase their motivation, stimulate the quality of their educational career and promote the creation of businesses based on their research projects.

In addition to technical skills, FEUP promotes a series of initiatives aimed at equipping students with new skills that will make them talented professionals in line with the real needs of the labour market.