# 10 Employability Skills Employers Look For, and How to Prove You Have Them Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/10-employability-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/10-employability-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 The 10 employability skills employers look for, from communication and teamwork to time management, with what each looks like at work and how to prove it. ## Key facts - Title: 10 Employability Skills Employers Look For, and How to Prove You Have Them - Category: Employability - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Teamwork, Time Management - Primary keyword: 10 employability skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/10-employability-skills/ ## What this page covers - The 10 employability skills employers look for, from communication and teamwork to time management, with what each looks like at work and how to prove it. - Practical guidance for 10 employability skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The 10 employability skills employers look for are communication, teamwork, decision-making, professional behaviors, time management, initiative and influence, self-awareness, resilience, confidence, and working with your manager. Between them, they cover how you work with other people and how you manage yourself, which is why they carry over to any job in any industry. If your degree feels like only part of what an application asks for, that instinct is accurate, and it is better news than it sounds. None of these skills is a personality trait. Each is a set of behaviors you can practice and then prove. The list itself is the easy part; what makes it useful is knowing what each skill looks like at work, and how to show it while your experience is still thin. ## What employers screen for when experience is thin When employers review entry-level candidates, they cannot judge years of work history, so they look for evidence of how you will work. According to NACE's Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update, the three skills employers most want to see evidence of are teamwork, problem-solving, and effective communication. The same survey found that more than half of employers name ten or more skills on their wish list. They are not hunting for one standout talent; they want a broad set. That also means nobody expects you to be outstanding at all ten on your first day. Employers value technical skills, analytical ability, and a strong work ethic as well. The first two are tied to your field and come largely from your education. Work ethic is different: it is judged from what you do, such as arriving on time, finishing what you said you would, and doing the dull parts of a job properly. That is true of most of the skills below. Your degree cannot prove them for you; your behavior has to. There is room to stand out. NACE reports that more than 70% of employers rate new graduates as somewhat well prepared for work, while only about 20% rate them as very well prepared. The skills below are the part of that picture you can work on yourself, starting with the job or studies you have now. ## The 10 employability skills employers look for Each of these applies in any role. For each one, here is what it looks like once you are at work, and what counts as evidence before you get there. ### 1. Teamwork Teamwork is one of the three skills employers most want evidence of, and "team player" on a resume is not evidence. At work, teamwork comes down to specific behaviors: doing what you committed to, sharing what you know instead of guarding it, giving the team credit, and disagreeing about the work without making it personal. Once the team has decided, you [commit to the decision](/knowledge/teamwork/disagree-and-commit/), even if you argued for something else. Your evidence can come from a group project, a part-time job, a sports team, or a volunteer role, as long as it says what you did and what came of it: the deadline you helped rescue, the task you picked up when someone dropped out. ### 2. Decision-Making Employers usually call this problem-solving, and it sits in their top three. In a first job, it rarely means cracking big analytical puzzles. It means everyday judgment calls: gathering the relevant facts, weighing the options, then either deciding within your own authority or recognizing that the decision belongs to someone else. Good habits here include asking someone more experienced for a second opinion, slowing down when you are rushed or upset, and accepting a good-enough answer instead of waiting for a perfect one. A judgment call from a shift at work or a student project, explained step by step, is valid evidence. ### 3. Communication Communication completes the top three, and you are judged on it before you start: your application, your emails, and your interview answers are all samples of it. At work, it comes down to a few habits. State your main point first, keep it brief, be clear and direct, and listen until you understand what the other person needs. Speak up in meetings, even briefly, and choose a conversation over an email when a topic is sensitive or complicated. Writing "strong communicator" proves nothing. A clear, well-structured application and one specific example, such as explaining a project's result to people who were not involved in it, prove a great deal. ### 4. Professional Behaviors This is where work ethic lives. It shows in the basics: being on time, being polite, finishing what you commit to, handling confidential information with care, and getting administrative tasks done without complaint. It also shows in how you treat people: respect for everyone regardless of their role, genuine interest in colleagues, and appreciation for the help you receive. The behaviors to avoid are just as telling, especially passivity, arrogance, and constant complaining. Much of this is learned in the workplace rather than in class, which makes a part-time job or internship valuable evidence even when the work itself had nothing to do with your field. ### 5. Time Management At school, the calendar is fixed. At work, priorities come from other people and shift without warning, so employers value new hires who can organize their own workload. Before you start a task, clarify who is asking, what exactly is needed, when it is due, and what "done" looks like. Put the important before the merely urgent, and break large tasks into smaller pieces. Managing your time also means setting limits: once you have built some credibility, saying no clearly, with a reason, is part of the skill rather than a failure of it. If you have kept a job going alongside your studies, you already have direct evidence. ### 6. Getting and Applying Influence For a new hire, [influence starts with initiative](/knowledge/influence/show-initiative-at-work/): taking on work without being prompted and solving problems on your own. Employers value it because it reduces how much supervision you need. You do not need authority to show it. Volunteer to prepare the agenda or write up the notes, follow up without being chased, and bring a possible solution along with every problem you raise. Over time, delivering consistently and being known for something specific builds the kind of reputation that makes people listen to your ideas. In an interview, a time you spotted something that needed doing and simply did it is strong evidence. ### 7. Building Self-Awareness Employers hiring entry-level staff expect to train them, so they look for people who learn quickly. That depends on how you take feedback: first understand it fully, then add your own view, then reflect on what to change, rather than defending yourself in the moment. It also helps to ask for feedback that is specific and forward-looking, such as what to do differently next time. Knowing your natural strengths, the things you are genuinely good at rather than merely competent at, tells you which roles and tasks will let you do your best work. A piece of feedback you acted on, and what changed as a result, is evidence an employer can use. ### 8. Building Resilience Every first job brings setbacks: work sent back for revisions, a visible mistake, a project that gets canceled. Resilience is the ability to recover and keep going rather than being thrown by them. It rests on learnable habits: focusing on what you can control, noticing the [automatic thought](/knowledge/resilience/automatic-thoughts/) that follows a setback ("I'm hopeless at this") and checking whether it is actually true, and talking problems through with people you trust. Employers value new hires who recover from early mistakes, because those mistakes are part of learning any job. Prepare one setback story for interviews: what went wrong, what you did next, and what you would do differently now. ### 9. Building Confidence Confidence at work is not a feeling you wait for. It is the belief that you can handle a specific task, and it is built by doing: taking on a slightly bigger challenge, practicing until it feels manageable, then taking the next step. It matters for employability because it lets the other skills show, from speaking up in a meeting to answering an interview question without talking yourself down. The nerves do not have to disappear first; acting while they are still there is the skill. Your evidence can be as simple as a presentation you volunteered for, or a responsibility you took on before you felt fully ready. ### 10. Working with Your Manager Your manager is the person who guides your training, reviews your performance, and shapes much of what you get to work on, so the relationship matters from your first week. Treat it as a partnership with a shared purpose. Deliver your part, keep your manager informed before you go to others, bring solutions along with problems, and come to one-on-ones prepared. Agree early on what success looks like and how much you can decide on your own. Before you start, the evidence lies in how you have worked with supervisors in part-time jobs or internships, and in the questions you ask about how your future manager likes to work. ## How to show these skills when your experience is thin According to NACE, employers want to see examples of skills, not just a list of them on a resume. That is good news if your work history is short, because employability skills are transferable: experience from part-time jobs, group projects, volunteering, sports, or student organizations all counts. The hard part is translation. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work put the problem like this: > I can solve a school assignment, do my research, structure a paper. But how do I turn 'searching literature for an exam' into something a workplace can use? Nobody on the degree tells us which jobs we can actually hold, or how academic skills become a work resource. Her academic skills are not wasted; they need a work-shaped description. Structuring a paper against a deadline is time management. Researching before you reach a conclusion is the first step of a sound decision. Keeping a group project on track after one member went quiet is teamwork, and probably communication too. A practical way to do the translation: - Pick the three or four skills where your examples are strongest, and lead with those. You do not need evidence for all ten. - For each one, write a short example: the situation, what you did, and what came of it. - Name the skill in [your resume](/knowledge/employability/soft-skills-to-write-in-cv/), and tell the example in your interview. If you are unsure which skills to lead with, a [clear read on your strengths](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) shows which ones are already working for you, so the examples you put first are the ones you can stand behind. ## Building the skills you are missing A gap on this list is not a verdict. These are behaviors, not traits, so a weak area is simply something you have not learned yet. Pick one skill at a time and practice it where you already are: in your part-time job, your next group project, or your student organization. Ask someone who sees you work for specific feedback, then try again. Since employers expect to train new hires anyway, being able to explain how you deliberately improved a skill works in your favor: it shows that you will keep learning once you are hired. ## The three skills that make the rest visible Look back at the strongest evidence in each entry, and three skills keep turning up inside the others. A good initiative story usually depends on delivering what you promised, on time. A good resilience story often involves the people you worked with and what you said to them. **Communication** is how every other skill on the list becomes visible to an employer. Your application, your emails, and the way you answer interview questions show it before you have done a single day's work, and they let you prove it rather than claim it. Leading with your main point, keeping it brief, and listening until you understand what is actually being asked are habits you can start practicing in your next email. **Teamwork** is where most of the others get tested. Almost every job puts you inside a team, and employers want to know whether you will strengthen it or create friction. The proof lies in specific behaviors: being reliable on what you commit to, sharing knowledge and credit, and keeping disagreements about the work rather than the person. Those behaviors give you real examples from group projects, part-time jobs, or sports. **Time Management** turns good intentions into delivered work. Without a school timetable, someone has to organize your workload, and at work that someone is you: clarifying what is asked and when it is due, and putting the important before the merely urgent. It is also one of the easiest skills to evidence, through how you balanced study, work, and everything else, and it includes setting sensible limits rather than being permanently available. Each of the three is a habit, so each can be built from wherever you are now. To find out which deserves your attention first, the Job Skills Test [scores your current level](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) on all three; they sit among the **twelve skills it covers**, and seeing them side by side makes it easier to pick a starting point. ## Where you already stand Some of this list may already describe how you work. If you have kept a part-time job going through exam season, or got a stalled group project moving again when a teammate stopped replying, you have practiced time management and teamwork under real pressure. None of these skills asks you to become someone else. They ask you to repeat, on purpose, what you have already done once, and to try the ones you have not tested yet. The more of your work runs through other people, the more these skills decide what your expertise is worth to them, which is a reason to start now rather than a reason to worry. Knowing which of the ten you can already rely on is the natural place to begin. ## Get a clear picture before your next application All that remains is to see your own starting point. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. In 7 minutes, it shows where you stand across all twelve, the ten above included, and which ones will make the biggest difference as you apply for your next role. Use the results to decide where to focus first. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, takes 7 minutes, results shown instantly.* ## 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? The 10 employability skills employers look for, from communication and teamwork to time management, with what each looks like at work and how to prove it. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Teamwork, Time Management. ### 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/employability.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/time-management.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/10-employability-skills/ Preferred summary: "The 10 employability skills employers look for, from communication and teamwork to time management, with what each looks like at work and how to prove it." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.