Volunteering as One of the Ways of Developing Engineering Students' Soft Skills

The paper discusses the involvement of engineering students in volunteering and skills they acquire as a result. The authors talk about the soft skills in the context of volunteering and how it can actually help students' professional life. Before COVID-19, student's volunteering included cleaning up parks or visiting the elderly and orphanages. While more than 90% of schools and universities around the world were closed, students of Kazan National Research Technological University continued developing their skills and education. In lockdown period students were involved in new ways of community volunteering as masks sewing, food supply, shopping for the elderly and more. With the global social distancing measures, they took volunteering online. Student's initiative was mobilizing their groups to support their communities in dealing with COVID-19. There are many skills that can be learned through volunteering such as teamwork, creativity, self-management, work ethics, flexibility etc. While hard skills are necessary for completing technical tasks, soft skills will make you the kind of worker employers want to hire, keep and promote. Students succeeded in developing their soft skills during this challenging time. The experimental work aimed at checking the effectiveness of the integrated volunteer activities to develop soft skills and it was proved by a comparative analysis of the data obtained at the initial stage of the study and after its completion. The study involved 85 engineering major Bachelor students from engineering university.