 Alright, so you want to become a successful engineer? Well, there are some common skills that all engineers will need to know in order to become the most successful, the best engineer that you can possibly be. Today I will talk to you about those skills and I will approach it from the perspective of a mining engineer because that's my background. These top skills that you need to learn can be separated into two groups. The first one is hard skills and the second one is soft skills. So hard skills refer to tangible skills such as doing math, using a program, operating a piece of equipment, etc., so something that's hands on. And soft skills refer to the interpersonal skills such as communication or leadership. And so today we'll be talking about the top five hard skills that all engineers, not just mining engineers, should know and should have in order to become the best engineer. So the first skill is mastery of a software that's relevant to your industry. And so for mining engineers, it will be mastering the mine planning software. Mine planning software is the bread and butter of our trade. We use it pretty much daily to design waste sums, haul rows, pit constructions, etc., Anything that we have to design in the mine, we do it through the mine planning softwares. There are many different softwares out there, but they all have pretty much the same functionalities. And it doesn't really matter which one that you master because they're all pretty similar. It's just that some of their functions, perhaps how you get to them or the steps you need to take in order to achieve a certain outcome may be just a little bit different. But all in all, most of the mining softwares are pretty much the same. And so if you can master one of them, you can easily master all the other ones. It might just take a little bit of time. The buttons may appear somewhere a little bit different, but they're all very similar. And so some of the more common mine planning softwares are Falcon, DeskWake, Minesite, Minescape and MicroMind. Those are the most common ones. But then there are also supporting mining related mine planning softwares that you may need to use, such as Hal Sim to simulate Hall Lich Pass or Mach 3D to simulate tailing step position. Most engineers will probably need to know a little bit of AutoCAD because that's how we get engineering drawings delivered to us. And so we have to be able to know how to open and do just minor manipulations of the design file in AutoCAD. To play, you'll learn how to use these mining engineering softwares within your mining engineering curriculum at university. But if they don't teach you how to do it, you can always go online and look for tutorials online on how to use these softwares. If you are a mining engineer, you can always just let me know and I can send you the link to some of the mining engineering software trainings that I recommend. But if you are not a mining engineer, there should be a bunch of tutorials, for example, for AutoCAD Civil 3D, because those are more commonly and widely used softwares out there. So they should have a lot of tutorials. The second hard skill that all engineers should master is knowing how to use Microsoft Excel. And so for us mining engineers, it's complimentary to actually using the mine planning softwares because the mine planning softwares design the physical shape and location of those structures, but we always have to do the volumetric or mass balance within Excel and create mining schedules based on them. And so typically with Microsoft Excel, we just need to know how to do basic mathematical functions. We don't need to know Microsoft Excel to a super in-depth detail. Typically, we just use it for creating our schedules, mass balances, and because the result get at storing multiple steps of calculations, and we can do it through different roles or different tabs, they're great for creating mine plans. And so as I mentioned before, while you don't need to be an expert with Microsoft Excel, there are some functions that you should know how to use. And I'll give a quick list here right now. And those functions are one, as I mentioned, the basic mathematical operations, number and cell formatting, conditional formatting, pivot tables, field cup or index match statements, graph and chart generation, formatting, linking values, pay specials and freezing cells. So all of these functions will be very handy for you and they're not super complicated to learn, but you definitely should take some time to learn these and add them to your toolbox of skills. The third hard skills that all engineers should know is how to use Microsoft PowerPoint effectively. And the reason why you need to know how to use PowerPoint is because once you have done all your calculations and all your designs, you need to have an effective way of communicating what you have just done to an external audience. And Microsoft PowerPoint is a great tool for that. Similar to Microsoft Excel, you don't need to know how to use Microsoft PowerPoint to a high level degree. You just mainly need to know how to insert pictures, make some basic layout design changes. Occasionally, you might need to know how to insert a video, but it's pretty simple. It's very much like inserting a picture. And also sometimes you may need to know how to convert a Microsoft PowerPoint to a PDF file because that may be what the clients or your customer may be looking for. So actually the hard skill part of using Microsoft PowerPoint to present is relatively simple. The soft skill component of making an effective presentation. So for example, not having too much words within a slide. That's sort of the art of creating an effective PowerPoint. And that's a little bit harder to master. And I'll talk about that a little bit later on in my next video about the top soft skills that all engineers should know. The fourth skill that most engineers should know is driving. And now this may not apply to all engineers. This will apply mostly to engineers that have a little bit of field work involved in their job description. So mining engineers, civil engineers, potentially mechanical engineers and geotechnical engineers. Having a driving license is a crucial skill to have, but especially for mining engineers. The reason for this is because as mining engineers, one of your job description or your job duties is that you should be able to drive out into the field and conduct field tours or field inspections to see if operations is building design as to what you have designed. And just to see and inspect and understand that everything is happening within the field. And so if you don't have a driver's license, it may actually make it a lot harder for you to apply and get accepted into a job. But even if you do get accepted into a job and you don't have that driving license or the ability to go into the field, it may just make your experience a lot more difficult because you won't have all the right information that you need in order to conduct your job. And so while there may be things like satellite photos or field surveys that can collect data for you, it may not be done frequently enough for you to make the right decisions or the right designs based on that limited data. Having field presence and field exposure and gathering data just from visually seeing is probably one of the best ways in order for you to get the right information. And one thing to note is that driving in the city and driving within a mine site or on site for whatever work you're doing if you're not a mining engineer, those are two very different things. Even if you know how to drive well in the city, you should always seek some additional guidance or mentorship whenever you're driving in the mine or at different operating conditions because they're very different set of driving conditions and the safety hazards that you have to look out for are very different. And so the fifth hard skill that all engineers should know is coding. Now, I can't speak much for the other disciplines of engineering, but for mining engineering, knowing how to code will really allow you to maximize the value of your mine planning software or your data collection system, whatever you may be using. For example, if you know how to code, you can automate certain processes within the mine planning softwares and that will allow you to save a lot of time to focus on the other important tasks. And so because different mining softwares will require different coding languages, I'll give you a quick list of what each software will use so you know which programming language you should strive to learn. And so for a Vulkan, we need to know how to use Perl, Serpac, you need to know how to use TCL, Mindmax, Python, Sprite, C Sharp, Bellastries, C Sharp, Excel, VBA, Oracle slash SQL Server, you need to know SQL. Unfortunately, there's not one common scripting language that you should know, but if there is one that I would recommend that you should know, to start things off with, it'll be Microsoft VBA because that's a language that you need to know in order to automate things in Microsoft Excel. And as we mentioned before, Microsoft Excel is a tool that all engineers, including mining engineers, will need to use in their day-to-day job functions. To summarize, the top five hard skills that you should know is learn how to use your design software. So for mining engineers, that's my planning software, you need to know Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, striving if you are a field-based position or have field exposure, and fifth is coding. And so if you're able to master all five of these hard skills, then you're halfway there to become a really awesome engineer. And the other half is the soft skills that you'll need to master, and we'll talk about that in the next video. So make sure you subscribe so that you don't miss that next video.