As an engineer in industry for gettin on 25 years, I have some experience to share. First language and communication: it is still a problem for new and seasoned engineers. Some communicate with excellent clarity, and some do not. Sometimes a deficiency is due to skill and sometimes due to attitude. But being capable of more effective communication will make a better engineer.

Analysis and skills basis: One thing I have seen with some newer engineers with some more advanced tool (i.e. FEA) skills, is not being able to answer the question, "does your result make sense?" I have been guilty of this myself, so I'm not setting myself apart here as an embodiment of a standard. It is necessary to judge a complex result, in terms of potential correctness, and to be able to gain credibility by explaining the quality and limitations of your results. It's potential correctness rather than correctness, because an analysis is a prediction of reality, and the only way to absolutely determine if it's correct is to perform physical testing. One can imagine that in say, the space vehicle industry, this is not always possible. So you have to instead be able to judge it on the basis of making sense.

Determining how you want to answer the "make sense?" question is a choice, but what I've found for circuit design and EM field related work is to be able to simplify a system down to a level that facilitates quick hand analysis, and to perform such analyses to find what ballpark a detailed prediction has to lie in. This requires all those undergraduate skills that we may have hated back in school, but it's why those are still necessary, even we have a supercomputer on our desk.

Last, as my earlier comment emphasized, there's a lot more to finding the "optimum" design than maxing out the technical properties. The first major issue is to define "optimum." This involves understanding the needs the end product must fulfill and how those relate to the technical properties of the product and all its parts. This is not or at least in my days was not taught in engineering school.

Good luck to all you young engineers! I hope my industry (automobiles) still has room for all of you when you are in the job market!

Road Fan