[ID:0648]While engineering is a technical profession with substantial emphasis on "hard" skills, the success or failure of an international engineering project most often rests upon "soft" skills. Can you manage a project where language and cultural differences abound? Are you good at handling contrasting approaches, values and expectations?

The cross-cultural aspect of an engineering project may, in fact, be the single most defining factor in your success overseas. For this reason, international recruiters place a lot of emphasis on it when selecting from a pool of candidates.

The engineering profession is very collaborative and interactive. Whatever the focus of your project, you will need to be able to communicate effectively to a broad range of individuals from varying cultures and backgrounds, including local communities, other engineers and managers, and government officials. Even when working with seemingly similar cultures (for example, a Canadian working in the States, or vice versa), an international engineer should be aware of subtle cultural...