A successful career in engineering is not just about IQ, it is also about EQ, or emotional intelligence, Qatar Cool CEO Yasser al-Jaidah told a gathering of students, faculty and staff at Texas A&M University at Qatar (Tamuq).  Al-Jaidah recently spoke as part of the Dean’s Leadership Series in the branch campus’ building in Education City.
It was during the information question-and-answer forum, the Qatari technocrat advised students to continually try to understand other people and cultures. “Your team is only as good as its members,” he said. “Emotional intelligence goes hand in hand with intelligence because you have to work with people from all different cultures and nationalities.”
Al-Jaidah advised they should expect to make students to never stop reading — not just engineering and technology articles and publications, but everything from philosophy to politics, because that will open their breadth of knowledge. He told students mistakes happen but they should try to learn from those mistakes and push past their comfort zones to truly diversify their experiences and themselves.  
Al-Jaidah also reflected on his early career as an electrical engineer when he avoided the back office and chose instead to work with technicians in the field to build his own hands-on capabilities. He started in the oil and gas industry and said he used his experiences in that field to learn what was needed to take Qatar to the next level.
Al-Jaidah has more than a decade of energy experience and has held positions throughout the field, including maintenance, operations engineering, project management, marketing and venture projects. He established the first liaison office for RasGas in Korea. He also held a position of Inlet Facilities Project Lead for the RasGas expansion phase two project and was seconded to ExxonMobil as a Project Execution Engineer in Houston, Texas. He has a wide variety of experience in the energy industry, and has worked on a range of worldwide projects on four continents in countries such as Qatar, Korea, Japan, France, Norway, US, Italy, Singapore and the UK.
Tamuq dean Dr César O Malavé said, “Leadership is one of the six core values of every student at Texas A&M University and this lecture series gives our students an opportunity to learn from some of the top government and industry leaders in Qatar.”