Traditionally, teachers are selected on the basis of hard skills. With academic excellence, one can secure teaching profession, can prepare standard lesson plans and can deliver good lectures. Still can we ensure the fact that the highest scorer will always be the best teacher? However, in this paper we will look for how much values do hard skills carry in transforming students. To become an influential teacher one must be equipped with sound interpersonal skills, strict discipline, endless managing power and thorough enthusiasm. By taking the total responsibilities of students, by proving his/her problem solving qualities, and by demonstrating his/her utmost creativity, a teacher can establish a relationship with students. All the later qualities are included into the segment of soft skills. Thus, only if a teacher, equipped with both hard and soft skills, engages the students effective teaching will take place. The current study has been conducted among 60 randomly selected students of tertiary level from different disciplines of both public and private universities in Bangladesh. They were asked to specify and explain three qualities of his/ her most influential teachers in life. After determining the keywords from their writings, they were asked to categories those under two subtitles, hard skills and soft skills. Result shows that “Reaching before Teaching”, the commonly cherished maxim in academia in the 21^st significantly proves its values.