# Communication and Soft Skills: What They Are and Which to Build First Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/communication-and-soft-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/communication-and-soft-skills.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Communication and soft skills are the nontechnical behaviors that decide how you work with people. Here are nine concrete ones, and how to start building them. ## Key facts - Title: Communication and Soft Skills: What They Are and Which to Build First - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Professional Behaviors, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: communication and soft skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/communication-and-soft-skills/ ## What this page covers - Communication and soft skills are the nontechnical behaviors that decide how you work with people. Here are nine concrete ones, and how to start building them. - Practical guidance for communication and soft skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation Most lists of communication and soft skills hand you adjectives — adaptable, collaborative, a good communicator — and leave you no clearer about what to do differently on Monday. So, plainly: communication and soft skills are the nontechnical skills that decide how you work with other people and how you manage yourself at work. They come in two kinds — interpersonal skills like communicating, teamwork and professional conduct, and self-regulatory skills like building your own confidence. Communication is simply the most visible one. They are also the part of the job almost nobody is formally taught. That is why the gap is so common, and why it closes faster than people expect once you can see the actual behaviors underneath the label. ## What communication and soft skills actually cover The label causes more confusion than it solves. Several of the better-read articles on the topic argue that communication should not be called a soft skill at all — TASBO runs a piece titled "Communication is Not a Soft Skill," and Integrity Solutions asks the same question — because "soft" makes the thing sound optional. The objection is fair, and you can set it aside in one move: the name is a historical accident, and what matters is the behaviors sitting under it. Those behaviors are not optional, and the hiring data is unusually blunt about it. Communication was the single most-requested skill across nearly two million job postings analyzed in December 2024, according to HR Dive — not highly rated in a survey, but written into the requisitions themselves, ahead of named technical tools. The National Association of Colleges and Employers puts communication at the top of its career-readiness list for graduates specifically. And LinkedIn's Global Talent Trends research reports that 92% of talent professionals rate skills like these as mattering at least as much as technical ones. One more thing worth knowing before the list: none of this is personality. Being quiet, or blunt, or slow to warm up puts none of it out of reach. These are behaviors with rules, and rules can be learned without becoming a different person. The harder part is working out which ones you already do well and which you were simply never told about — a short free assessment gives you [a baseline to work from](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), which beats reading a list of nine and hoping. ## Nine skills that decide how you come across at work Here is what the category actually contains, written as things you do rather than things you are. ### 1. Listening in a way the other person can tell Most people think they already listen well. The workplace version is narrower: you give the person [your full attention](/knowledge/communication/active-listening-workplace/), you let them finish, and you say enough back that they can tell you understood — a one-line summary, or a clarifying question. Sources across the topic keep returning to this one first, and the reason is practical. A large share of what looks like a communication breakdown at work is one person carefully answering a question the other person did not ask. It is also the cheapest of these to start on, because you can do it in your next conversation without telling anyone you are doing it. ### 2. Saying the main point first School trains you to build an argument and put the conclusion at the end. Work runs the other way. Say the outcome, the decision or the ask in your first sentence, then give the reasoning to whoever wants it. This feels abrupt for about a week, and it is the fastest available way to sound more capable than you did before. It also survives contact with busy people, which the alternative does not: managers and senior colleagues read and listen in fragments, and a point buried in the third paragraph often simply never arrives. ### 3. Knowing when to stop typing and go talk Choosing the wrong channel causes a surprising amount of avoidable friction. Writing is right when the other person needs time to think, when there has to be a record, or when the message is one-way information. Conversation is right when the topic is sensitive, complicated, contested, or when trust is still being built. A usable test: if you are drafting your third message in a thread, or rereading a sentence to check whether it sounds annoyed, the topic has outgrown email. Walk over, or call. ### 4. Email someone can act on Email is where a lot of early-career credibility is quietly won or lost, and the rules are unglamorous. Put the point in the first line. [Write a subject line](/knowledge/communication/email-writing/) that says what the message is about, not "quick question." Copy in the people who need it and nobody else. Proofread once. Reply within a day even if the reply is only that you have seen it. Sources call this "digital tone" — the fact that intent gets read differently in writing, where none of your body language is available to soften anything. ### 5. Speaking up in meetings Meetings are where most colleagues form their working impression of you, and silence is not read as neutral — it reads as having nothing to add. You do not have to talk a lot. Preparing one useful thing and [saying it early](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/how-to-speak-up/), rather than waiting for the perfect moment that never quite arrives, is enough. It helps to know what kind of meeting you are in: sharing information, solving a problem, updating status or building the team each ask something different of you, and misjudging that is what makes a contribution land badly. ### 6. Giving feedback, and taking it Both halves are learnable and both fail in predictable ways. Giving it: keep it about the work and the specific instance rather than the person, and do it soon instead of saving it up for a quarterly moment. Taking it: the useful order is to understand the point first, add your own view second, and reflect on it afterward — rather than defending in the moment, which is what nearly everyone does instinctively. Across the sources, defensiveness rather than disagreement is named as the thing that goes wrong. Feedback that stings is not the same as feedback that is wrong. ### 7. Disagreeing without making it personal Avoiding disagreement looks polite and costs teams real money in decisions nobody challenged. The workable version has two halves. First, [disagree about the thing](/knowledge/teamwork/how-to-disagree-respectfully/) and not the person, and stay on the topic even when someone else stops doing so. Second — and this is the half the lists skip — once the decision is made, commit to it properly. Argue beforehand, then implement loyally, including when the call went against you. That is what separates someone worth disagreeing with from someone people quietly stop inviting. ### 8. The everyday conduct people notice but never mention This is the part that never makes the adjective lists. Being on time. Dressing for the role you are actually in. Treating people the same regardless of their seniority. Speaking about absent colleagues the way you would if they were in the room. Handling confidential information as though it were confidential. Muting yourself on video calls. Colleagues almost never give feedback on any of this, which is precisely the problem — you find out you got it wrong through the atmosphere rather than through anyone telling you. ### 9. Being reliable enough that people stop checking Trust at work is built from something duller than charisma: you say you will do a thing, and then the thing is done, on the day you said. Do that for a few months and colleagues stop double-checking your work, which is usually the moment more interesting work starts arriving. The reverse is just as mechanical. Two missed commitments with no heads-up and people begin building a quiet buffer around you, without ever mentioning it. Flagging a slip early costs almost nothing; having it discovered late costs a lot. ## The skills that make the rest of this easier Read back over those nine and they stop looking like nine separate things to memorize. They cluster. **Communication** covers most of what you just read — the listening, the main-point-first habit, the channel choice, the email, the meetings, the awkward conversations about feedback and disagreement. Treating it as one skill rather than seven unrelated tips is what makes it improvable: you learn a small set of principles and then apply them everywhere, instead of collecting tricks. Very little of it is public speaking. Nearly all of it is the ordinary traffic of a working week. **Professional Behaviors** is the eighth item on that list, and it sits there because those behaviors operate as a set rather than individually. Punctuality, impartial respect, how you talk about people who are not present, what you do with information you were trusted with — these are signals colleagues read constantly and comment on almost never. They are also observable and copyable, which is the good news. You can learn most of them by watching what the people who are trusted around you actually do. **Building Confidence** is the one that decides whether the other two ever get practiced. The route is not feeling ready first. It is doing the thing at a size you can handle — one prepared point in a meeting long before any presentation — accepting that it feels uncomfortable rather than waiting for that to pass, and when something goes badly, working out what went wrong rather than who was wrong. Competence arrives after the attempt, not before it. Self-diagnosis is the weak spot here: the skills people underrate in themselves are rarely the ones they would have guessed. A free assessment scores you across **all twelve work skills the framework treats as buildable**, these three among them, and shows you [which gap costs you most](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). Some of those nine will have felt obvious as you read them, most likely because you already do them without calling them anything. That is worth registering rather than skipping past — the category is not a wall you are standing outside of. The rest are behaviors, not features of who you are. Nobody has to become louder, or more outgoing, or a different sort of person in order to reply to an email within a day or to put the point in the first sentence. The handful that would make the most difference to you right now is a much shorter list than nine, and they stay learnable in the ordinary sense: by doing them, badly at first, until they are not. That matters, because these skills weigh more the further into a career you get — more of the work becomes other people — and nothing about them closes off with time. By reading past the adjective list to find out what the behaviors actually are, you have already done the part most people skip. ## Find out which of these to work on first The only thing left is to see where you stand, and that part is quick. The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: you answer a set of questions and get a profile of how you score across all twelve — communication, professional behaviors and confidence among them — along with which ones would make the biggest difference to you now. No preparation, and nothing to read first. **[Take the skills test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, and it takes about 7 minutes.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Communication and soft skills are the nontechnical behaviors that decide how you work with people. Here are nine concrete ones, and how to start building them. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Professional Behaviors, Building Confidence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/communication-and-soft-skills/ Preferred summary: "Communication and soft skills are the nontechnical behaviors that decide how you work with people. Here are nine concrete ones, and how to start building them." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.