China(Shanghai, Beijing) will be a good place to go to find IT job that require English communication (good pay), and don't have to worry about visa issue. Just go to linkedin, and find local recruiter there.
Find out what problems worth solving is better approach than what technology to pick up. So what problem what you like to solve in 5 years, and start solving it.
What do you want to achieve with soft skill. If to help you develop better software. I think always ask detail question about business, user requirements. Able to break down large business case to smaller ones. Write better comments about your code, should be enough.
1. write down business requirement (Break to small stores that you can finish each story in a day)
2. write down technical requirement (over all)
3. write down expect test cases in English. (When something happen, what is expected)
The question is too general. There are shortage for certain requirements of engineer. For example experienced engineer to build self driving car is in shortage, or engineer understand high speed trading.
I don't think there is a shortage for engineer without much real world experiences.
"Minimum" vacation gives employee the authority to take vacation without feeling guilt. Else some companies use open vacation policy to reduce the number of vacations that employee take.