Success in the world of work has become a necessity that many professionals have in common: establishing oneself in society means being able to read the contexts and anticipate opportunities for growth. What enables us to realize this need is the concept of competence, a strategic competence defined as the ability to organize and mobilize all our knowledge, skills and competences (Alberici, Serreri 2009). According to a survey conducted by Manpowergroup in collaboration with the University of Florence (Manpowergroup, 2014), which involved over 600 companies throughout Italy, the key skills for a young person entering the world of work are three: the ability to work in team, orientation towards results and ideational thinking. In the field of selection, transversal skills also represent about 60% of the evaluation. In the context of Lifelong Learning, the manager becomes a prominent figure, whose professionalism is given both by practical experience and by theoretical knowledge. A good example in which soft and hard skills determine success. Research on the essential skills for a successful job, described by Cathy N. Davidson (2017) on Google employees, confirms the thesis that transversal skills are fundamental for the success of work performance. In addition, according to LinkedIn, there are more companies struggling to find candidates with the right soft skills (59%) of those who are struggling to find candidates with the right skills (53%). 58% of human resources managers believe that insufficient cross-cutting capacity between employees limits the productivity of the company. The main goal is investigate the level of skills in the managers who have held this role for at least 5 years and compare them with samples of recent graduates in engineering and recent graduates of humanities. The final aim is to design a training course for professionals to improve soft skills within organizations to achieve successful work performance. The quantitative data acquired through the BIP questionnaire will describe the sample of engineers, faculty students and humanities managers. For the latter research group, qualitative interviews will be proposed to integrate the quantitative results. Once the data are obtained, they will be analyzed obtaining inferences that may or may not demonstrate the validity of transversal skills, according to the different types of professions and students. Key words: soft skills, competences, managers, engineers, successful performance, knowledge society