Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a traffic engineer and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
A traffic engineer seeks to find solutions for traffic problems by developing road networks. He/she is involved in developing safe and efficient highways and roads as well as develop designs that will streamline traffic but still be economical.
Other responsibilities include working together with civil engineers to advise them on the safest projects. Through careful planning, they can determine the number and weight of vehicles that the new roads or highways might accommodate. They also provide insights into the most appropriate points to place exits and roundabouts without causing more traffic problems. Furthermore, he/she is involved in finding solutions for parking lots and traffic jams. Besides, they predict the use of road network in the future.
Core Skills Required to be a Traffic Engineer
Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.
Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.
A traffic engineer should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Interpersonal Skills:
Interpersonal Skills are a set of abilities that enable a person to positively interact and work with others effectively while avoiding office disputes and personal issues with each other.
A Traffic Engineer must learn the importance of these skills in the workplace and emphasis on every employee possessing them to build a more cohabit able and productive workplace with the help of each.
Facilitation:
Facilitation is making tasks or life easy for others while ensuring the daily running of successful meetings or workshops or business at large.
A Traffic Engineer must use facilitation to process and structure a system that meets the needs of either an individual or a team to help them achieve their goals as well as add value to their lives by making sure each participates.
Developing Others:
Developing others is an unremitting process that focuses on the broader, longer-term growth of individuals to nurture them to their potential and promote future development.
A Traffic Engineer needs to support, coach, positively impacts and effectively aid in developing talents of their staff by motivating them to become outstanding in their behavioral change and performance improvement that opens up development opportunities in the organization.
Equal Opportunity and Diversity:
Equal Opportunity and Diversity means having employees from a wide range of background that includes different ages, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious belief, educational background, physical ability and treating them equally.
A Traffic Engineer is required by the law to create a workplace free from discrimination and harassment to its employees as well as understand and adhere to the rights and responsibilities under the human rights and antidiscrimination law.
Potential for Advancement:
The potential for Advancement is the ability to make something better by being more skillful, more efficient, and more useful to produce high-quality results.
A Traffic Engineer needs to invest in his employees by creating room for individual advancement that encourages stronger job performance because it positions the employees to demonstrate just how well they can perform their jobs through motivation and feedback that are critical to the employee performance.
Conceptual Thinking:
Conceptual Thinking is the ability to recognize a situation or problem by identifying patterns or connections while addressing the underlying issues.
A Traffic Engineer must be a conceptual thinker who has a keen understanding of why things have to be done the way they are; he has to think at an abstract level and apply his insights to the situation across all facets to compete in the diverse and growing economy.
Handling Stress:
Handling Stress is the skill to balance the requirements of the job and your abilities or available resources in performing it.
A Traffic Engineer needs to creatively learn how to schedule work according to the abilities of different individuals to ensure a balance that will not put an unsustainable level of pressure on the employees and cause them to accumulate work related stress.
Personal Drive:
Personal Drive is a combination of desire and energy in its simplest form directed at achieving a goal in whatever you have set your heart to accomplish.
A Traffic Engineer needs to creatively design ways that drive the staff to carry out their work without wasting time by helping them understand and develop their self-motivation skills that assist them to take control of many different viewpoints of their life.
Project and Goal Focus:
Project and Goal Focus is setting your mind and heart on things that matter and add value to your life against those things that add no value at all or of little value.
A Traffic Engineer ought to learn of early hiccups that may cause distraction and get to motivate the employees early enough to see the projects completed promptly and in good condition.
Business Trend Awareness:
Business Trend Awareness is the capacity to be conscious of the changing ways in which the companies are developing in the marketplace.
A Traffic Engineer should have the required knowledge of new business trends that he can instigate or follow and the understanding of how they are impacting the business decisions which will eventually bring success to the employees as well as the enterprise
Hard Skills Required to be a Traffic Engineer
Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.
Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.
A traffic engineer should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.