As a structural engineer, spatial skills.
I luckily had these skills, but my job requires a lot more spatial comprehension than gets taught in class. I’ve seen people graduate college and are able to use design equations, but completely fall apart when you ask them to point out on a plan what they are designing.
How to act corporate. It’s something you kinda have to just pick up after a while, it can’t be taught.
Mostly the human factor in working in IT. It shows you have to manage systems and the larger concepts so that you can keep yourself up-to-date, but they don’t prepare you for how bad some people can be.
IT, at almost every level and position, is 50% psychology, 40% reading, and 10% working with technology.
Honestly, I think it would be better if we had actual trained councilors / therapists to take some tickets, maybe as a different department that was trained on taking or working with the same ticketing system but also handling confidentiality correctly. The people who contact IT just to talk or to bitch about the current state of the world as seen through a technology lens, or those who are overstressed about tech… I’m not really a people person, I’m a tech person, hence why I didn’t go into social services or the like.
Risk assessments.
These days my job doesn’t have much connection to my degree subject at all, so there is very little that it prepared me for. But my previous role - ranger - was very much tied into the subject that I took: Environmental Science.
Risk assessments are not unique to this area, of course and some of this is due to it being 20 odd years ago that I that I got my degree, but even so, looking back, I am surprised that risk assessments didn’t feature anywhere. Not during that degree nor during the - much more practically based - arboriculture course that I took shortly before.
