Yes!. Having good soft skills is really important, notably being able to do a confident presentation. I was painfully nervous of such things while at Uni and us

Yes!. Having good soft skills is really important, notably being able to do a confident presentation. I was painfully nervous of such things while at Uni and usually managed to avoid them, but eventually had to bite the bullet in industry. Because I started work in a research group that evaluated new software / concepts for the rest of the company, it was literally my job to communicate technical findings to non-technical people. To my surprise, I found that I could in fact stand up in a room and present, and eventually I came to enjoy it. I realised that I would have got better in academia had I started this earlier, and used the relatively benign Uni environment as a practice arena, as it were.