  Important building blocks of software engineering concepts are without a
doubt technical. During the last decade, research and practical interest for
non-technicalities has grown, revealing the building blocks to be various
skills and abilities beside pure technical knowledge. Multiple attempts to
categorise these blocks have been made, but so far little international studies
have been performed that identify skills by asking experts from both the
industrial and academic world: which abilities are needed for a developer to
excel in the software engineering industry? To answer this question, we
performed a Delphi study, inviting 36 experts from 11 different countries
world-wide, affiliated with 21 internationally renowned institutions. This
study presents the 55 identified and ranked skills as classified in four major
areas: communicative skills (empathy, actively listening, etc.), collaborative
skills (sharing responsibility, learning from each other, etc.), problem
solving skills (verifying assumptions, solution-oriented thinking, etc.), and
personal skills (curiosity, being open to ideas, etc.), of which a comparison
has been made between opinions of technical experts, business experts, and
academics. We hope this work inspires educators and practitioners to adjust
their training programs, mitigating the gap between the industry and the
academic world.
