This might come across as a very strange question but is it uncommon to find engineers who did not enjoy school or think highly of the schools that they attended? I have encountered numerous computing and IT types over the years who did not enjoy school or had bad experiences at school but very few electrical or mechanical engineers.
Just to quickly reinforce Alasdair's post, examples of key points an interviewer will ideally look for where it comes to communication skills are:
Answering the question that was asked, hence showing listening skills
Keeping to the point
Being aware of the interviewer's body language etc, so knowing when to keep going and when they've said enough
Using technical terms etc correctly and in context
Being clear in the answers
Where there is an interview panel, communicating with the whole panel (I've seen candidates get this spectacularly wrong where they wrongly guess who the key person is)
Staying polite under pressure (again something candidates regularly get spectacularly wrong)
Being able to be open when they don't know an answer
These correlate pretty well to the communication skills required by engineers in practice. The other point, as Alasdair says, is to be able to communicate excellently with engineers whose first language is not your own. Major engineering projects tend to be multinational, and there is a whole separate way of communication to be learnt to write precisely and accurately in a way that can be understood by non-native speakers. I typically work on documents which have the range of words (technical terms excepted) and complexity of sentence structure that you might reasonably expect from roughly a 10 year old native English speaker. But within those constraints it's possible to be surprisingly precise. Some engineers find this frustrating, which I can totally understand, personally I find it really interesting - a bit like one of those challenges where you try to build a bridge out of pencils and rubber bands.
Just to quickly reinforce Alasdair's post, examples of key points an interviewer will ideally look for where it comes to communication skills are:
Answering the question that was asked, hence showing listening skills
Keeping to the point
Being aware of the interviewer's body language etc, so knowing when to keep going and when they've said enough
Using technical terms etc correctly and in context
Being clear in the answers
Where there is an interview panel, communicating with the whole panel (I've seen candidates get this spectacularly wrong where they wrongly guess who the key person is)
Staying polite under pressure (again something candidates regularly get spectacularly wrong)
Being able to be open when they don't know an answer
These correlate pretty well to the communication skills required by engineers in practice. The other point, as Alasdair says, is to be able to communicate excellently with engineers whose first language is not your own. Major engineering projects tend to be multinational, and there is a whole separate way of communication to be learnt to write precisely and accurately in a way that can be understood by non-native speakers. I typically work on documents which have the range of words (technical terms excepted) and complexity of sentence structure that you might reasonably expect from roughly a 10 year old native English speaker. But within those constraints it's possible to be surprisingly precise. Some engineers find this frustrating, which I can totally understand, personally I find it really interesting - a bit like one of those challenges where you try to build a bridge out of pencils and rubber bands.
