# Describing Communication Skills: How to Say What You Actually Do Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/describing-communication-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/describing-communication-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 Describing communication skills means naming the behavior, not the label. The five parts people describe separately, and how to make a claim believable. ## Key facts - Title: Describing Communication Skills: How to Say What You Actually Do - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Influence - Primary keyword: describing communication skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/describing-communication-skills/ ## What this page covers - Describing communication skills means naming the behavior, not the label. The five parts people describe separately, and how to make a claim believable. - Practical guidance for describing communication skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation Describing communication skills well means naming the specific behavior instead of the label: which part of communication you actually do — listening, writing, presenting, raising a disagreement — in what situation, and what changed because you did it. The category word is what everyone writes. The incident is what gets believed. Which is why the sentence is so hard to produce. You communicate all day, so you know you have something — you just cannot point to the piece of it that counts as a skill, and "strong communicator" lands flat even as you type it. There is a reason for that, and it is fixable: the word covers at least five separate capabilities, and once they are pulled apart, each one becomes something you can describe. ## Why "strong communicator" describes nothing Because everyone writes it. Indeed's resume guidance puts it directly: "communication" or "strong communicator" in a skills list is not enough, because the reader wants to see how the skill was used — when your communication solved a problem or moved something forward. A claim that costs nothing to make carries no information. The replacement is not a better adjective, which is where most of the advice online goes — a whole cluster of results offers twenty, thirty, thirty-five other ways to say "good communication skills." Trading "strong communicator" for "articulate" changes the vocabulary and nothing else; it is still a self-assessment nobody can check. What works is a smaller, more specific claim: the report you restructured because nobody read past page one, the handover you wrote, the objection you raised in the room instead of afterwards. Specific claims survive the follow-up question. ## The five parts of communication skills people describe separately The definitional half of the search results converges on one breakdown. University of the People, Creately and UK Body Talk all split communication into spoken, listening, written, nonverbal and visual, with other cuts running alongside — formal versus informal, live versus asynchronous, one-to-one versus one-to-many. Treat the list as vocabulary rather than theory. Its use is that you are almost certainly not equally good at all five, and a description that says which is more credible than one that claims the whole word. ### Spoken Everything said out loud: a status update, a question in a meeting, a call with someone in another team. It happens in real time and cannot be revised before it arrives, which is what makes it feel unclaimable — but the describable units are small. Stating your conclusion before the reasoning rather than narrating your way toward it. Keeping it short when the room is tired. Explaining something a second way when the first way did not land, without being asked. Meetings are a case of their own: [an information meeting](/knowledge/communication/meeting-attend/), a problem-solving meeting and a status update reward different behavior, and recognizing which one you are in is worth naming. ### Listening Several sources treat this as the strongest of the five rather than the passive one — UK Body Talk puts [active listening](/knowledge/communication/active-listening-in-communication/) first on the grounds that trust and accurate understanding both run through it. The observable version is unflattering to most of us: giving someone your full attention, not assembling your reply while they are still talking, checking what they meant rather than acting on what you assumed, and moderating how long you speak so the other person gets room. If you can describe doing it under pressure — with an irritated colleague, in a meeting already running late — you are describing the part employers most want and hear about least. ### Written Emails, updates, documentation, handovers. The behaviors here are unglamorous and completely concrete: leading with the main message instead of building toward it, a subject line that says what the message is about, only the people who need it on the recipient list, a proofread before sending. Underneath them sits the decision almost no description mentions — whether to write at all. Writing is right when the other person needs time to absorb something, when it needs to be on record, or when it is genuinely one-way; a conversation is right for anything sensitive, complicated, or in need of agreement. Choosing correctly between them is describable, and hardly anyone claims it. ### Nonverbal Body language, facial expression, posture, and what your tone conveys independently of your words. This is the hardest of the five to claim honestly, because you cannot watch yourself doing it. Describe it through effect rather than intent: noticing that an explanation had not landed and changing it, or picking up that a colleague had an objection they had not said out loud. Avoid claiming to "read people" — it is unverifiable and reads as inflated. ### Visual Charts, diagrams, slides. The guides include it because a badly built slide can undo a good explanation, but it is role-dependent rather than universal, and plenty of jobs never ask for it. If yours does not, leave it out rather than padding. Where it does apply, the claim is concrete: the process you drew because describing it in prose kept failing. ## What makes a description believable Three things, ideally in one sentence: the situation, what you specifically did, and what changed. Resume.io suggests varying the verb across the range — negotiated, persuaded, briefed, listened, advised — rather than repeating "communicated," which forces you to cover distinct acts instead of restating one. Several sources recommend showing more than one audience, and the example that recurs is writing technical documentation for developers alongside a user guide for non-technical customers, because serving two audiences from the same material demonstrates adaptation in a way an adjective cannot. Those same articles then illustrate the principle with invented corporate outcomes — millions in contracts, support tickets down forty percent — which is where a first-job reader concludes none of this applies to them. It does. The result does not have to be large, only real. "Nobody asked for a summary after that" is a result. The five categories also leave out the situations that carry the most weight at work. [Disagreeing without making it personal](/knowledge/teamwork/how-to-disagree-respectfully/). Giving feedback that gets used. Handling someone who is angry. Apologizing properly. These are the moments most people route around, which is why describing one is evidence rather than assertion. There is a catch running underneath all of it. Deciding which parts you can honestly claim requires knowing how you come across, and self-rating on communication is unreliable in a well-known direction — almost everyone puts themselves above average. [Asking two colleagues](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/feedback-on-communication-skills/) for specific, future-focused input is one route in. Working through [which parts hold up](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) against a structured set of questions is another, and it is faster. Either way, whatever it turns up is workable: a weak part is a behavior you have not learned yet, not a ceiling. ## Describing communication skills in an interview or on a CV On a CV, the description belongs inside your experience bullets, not in a skills sidebar. One line naming a communication act and its result does more than five adjectives in a list. In an interview, "describe your communication skills" is a stock question, and the standard advice across the career sites is to answer with a situation rather than a self-assessment — what the situation was, what you had to do, what you did, and how it turned out. It works because it hands the interviewer something to picture, and because it can be checked. Two moves make it stronger. Name the part rather than the whole — say you are good at written updates and less practiced at presenting, if that is true. And name one thing you are working on. Anyone claiming all five categories equally is either exceptional or not paying attention, and the person opposite you knows which is more common. ## The skills underneath a description you can defend Read back through what actually made those descriptions work and the wording was rarely the difficulty. It was knowing what you do, having done something worth describing, and getting the claim to land on someone else. **Communication** is the mechanical layer, and it is wider than the five categories suggest. The same handful of principles runs through all of them: genuinely wanting to understand the other person, adapting to how they take things in, being clear and direct, being brief, putting the main point first, speaking up where your job requires it. Around those sit the practical choices — conversation or writing, what belongs in an email, how to be useful in a meeting — and the situations most people avoid: disagreement, feedback, an angry customer, an apology. Every one of them is a nameable behavior, which is the only reason any of this is describable. **Building Self-Awareness** is what makes the description accurate rather than hopeful. Knowing which parts you are genuinely good at — not merely competent at — comes from a few plain questions: which of these do you do without effort, which leave you energized rather than drained, and which produce results other people notice. The other half is external. Asking a colleague for specific, future-focused input on how you come across closes the gap between the version you describe and the version people receive, and that gap is exactly what an interviewer is probing for. **Influence** decides whether the description lands. The moves are the same ones that work for any claim: keep it simple, open with something that earns attention, use an example instead of an assertion, and include the drawback alongside the strength, because a description that admits a limit is more believable than one that does not. The longer version does more work than any wording ever will — being known for something specific means other people end up describing your communication for you. The free Job Skills Test scores those three separately rather than blending them into a single verdict, alongside nine more: twelve behaviors in total, none of them things you either have or do not. If your description keeps coming out vague, seeing [which one is thinnest](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) usually explains it, and it tells you what to build next. ## Where this starts to matter Some of this is probably already true of you. If you have ever cut the first two sentences of an email because they said nothing, or gone back to check that someone had understood rather than assuming they had, you were doing the thing the phrase is trying to name. If there is a gap, it will sit in a specific place rather than across the whole word, and it closes through practice rather than by becoming more outgoing than you are. The quiet version of every behavior above works. It also compounds. The further into a career you get, the more of the people deciding about you will know your work only through how it gets described — often in one sentence, often written by you. Most applications get that sentence written in under a minute, out of the same small pile of adjectives everyone else uses. You stopped to work out what the words are supposed to cover, which is what will make your version different from theirs. ## See where your communication skills actually stand What is left is the part you cannot settle by reading. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of how you work: you answer questions about what you actually do rather than what you would like to do, and it shows where you stand across all twelve work skills — communication among them — and which one or two would make the most difference to you right now. It takes about 7 minutes and there is nothing to prepare. Come out of it with a specific answer, and describing your communication skills stops being a wording problem. **Take the skills test** Free, about 7 minutes, and you see your results straight away. ## 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? Describing communication skills means naming the behavior, not the label. The five parts people describe separately, and how to make a claim believable. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Influence. ### 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/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/describing-communication-skills/ Preferred summary: "Describing communication skills means naming the behavior, not the label. The five parts people describe separately, and how to make a claim believable." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.