How Significant are Soft Skills to Line Managers in an Aviation Engineering Organisation?

Masters Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: Merit, University of Malta (Faculty of Economics, Management and Accountancy), course: Executive Masters in Business and Administration, language: English, abstract: Aviation engineering is a highly technical line of work, and most certainly a high level of technical skills, also known as hard skills, are required for technically maintaining aircraft. However, this research study investigates a group of aircraft engineers and their respective line managers, who themselves are also aircraft engineers, to outline the current perception of soft skills and its significance to these line managers in this particular aviation engineering organisation. Following this investigation, it is the objective of this study to elicit possible beneficiary recommendations for further recognition of the aviation engineering professions esteem. The aviation engineering industry has been evolving for over a century to keep up with technological improvements and the professional culture of the personnel working in this industry requires a continuous adaptation to changes in business requirements. Engineering in aviation has been proven to be a direct link in the aviation safety chain, however, in due to the fact that this line of work is often executed in restricted areas of airports, it is secreted from the general public, and is therefore very poorly promoted and is very rarely a research attraction for social scientists. The access available to the author as an aircraft engineer within the researched organisation, grants the possibility to carry out primary research on the subject group of employees. Literature review findings concerning five soft skill attributes and their relation to both engineering in general, as well as aviation engineering, are investigated to discover their relation to front line management in this organisation, and to expose if these skil