Soft Skills: how to make the young engineers aware of their new talents?

The competency framework attached to the Life science engineering Master at Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech, University of Liege (Belgium) is composed of technical and scientific skills but also soft skills which are not connected to academic courses. For the training of these skills, university needs the collaboration of the professional world. Therefore, the role of our teachers evolves towards a guiding or mentoring role. They will help students to analyse their professional experiences in order to shape their professional identity, to bring to light their acquired skills. This article describes how the portfolio, used as internship’s report, will help students to gain the self-confidence about their abilities and how professors can use these reflexive analyses to evaluate the acquisition of these soft skills.