# The Definition of Employability Skills, and How to Show You Have Them Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/definition-of-employability-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/definition-of-employability-skills.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving professional behaviors at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Employability skills are the non-technical skills behind how you work with others and manage yourself at work. See the four areas they cover and how to show yours. ## Key facts - Title: The Definition of Employability Skills, and How to Show You Have Them - Category: Employability - Primary skill: Professional Behaviors - Related skills: Communication, Teamwork - Primary keyword: definition of employability skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/definition-of-employability-skills/ ## What this page covers - Employability skills are the non-technical skills behind how you work with others and manage yourself at work. See the four areas they cover and how to show yours. - Practical guidance for definition of employability skills - How this topic connects to Professional Behaviors ## Detailed explanation The simplest definition of employability skills: they are the non-technical skills that decide how well you work with other people and how well you manage yourself at work, such as communicating clearly, working in a team, behaving professionally and organizing your time. They carry over to any role or industry, and they sit alongside your qualifications rather than inside them. That is why the phrase keeps turning up in job ads, course modules and career workshops even when your grades are in order. A degree shows what you know. Employability skills are about what you can do with it once deadlines, colleagues and real consequences are involved. If you suspect your qualification will not settle the question on its own, you are right, and that is less worrying than it sounds. Broken into its parts, the term turns out to be specific, visible and learnable. ## What the definition of employability skills covers Employability skills are easiest to grasp as a few distinct areas rather than one long list of virtues. The [Employability Skills Framework](/knowledge/employability/employability-skills-framework/), developed in 2012 with funding from the U.S. Department of Education, sorts nine key skills into three categories: Applied Knowledge, Effective Relationships and Workplace Skills. The framework presents them as the general skills needed to succeed in the labor market at every employment level and in every sector. Indiana's Department of Workforce Development draws the map a little differently, with four categories: Mindsets, Learning Strategies, Social & Emotional Skills and Work Ethic. That second map brings out one more area worth naming on its own, the habits and attitudes you bring to work. Together they give you four parts to hold yourself up against. ### Applied knowledge: putting what you know to work Knowing your subject is not the same as being able to use it. A knowledge base on its own is not enough, because work asks you to apply it under conditions that study rarely creates. Deadlines are set by someone else. Responsibility is shared. Information is incomplete, and other people depend on what you hand over. Applied knowledge is the part of employability skills that lets you function in those conditions, and it is the part that closes the distance between a qualification and being ready for work. That distance explains why a good degree can still leave you feeling unprepared. The gap is not in what you learned. It is in turning what you learned into something a workplace can use, and that turning is a skill of its own. > I thought: you've been to university, you've learned everything, now you can do anything. I've taken every course — and I can't. When I get a job it'll be a company taking me in because they can use me in the long run, but in the short run they'll have to teach me a lot. That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, and her point is not that the courses were wasted. Her degree is what makes her worth investing in. What she saw is that using it is learned on the job, which means it can be practiced from the first placement, student job or project where someone else relies on your work. ### Effective relationships: working with other people This area covers the interpersonal side of work: how you deal with colleagues, managers and clients, and the qualities that make people want to keep working with you. It is the part of the definition that is about people rather than tasks. It also covers qualities such as reliability, honesty and integrity, and commitment. They sound like personality traits, but at work they show up as behaviors: replying when you said you would, [owning a mistake](/knowledge/confidence/making-mistakes-at-work/) instead of letting it slide, finishing your share of a joint task before the deadline rather than on it. Seeing them as behaviors is useful, because behaviors can be practiced. You do not need a different personality to become more reliable. You need a few habits you repeat until they hold. ### Workplace skills: handling the work itself Where effective relationships are about people, workplace skills are about the work: communicating what you are doing, organizing your time and tasks, and handling information and the tools of the job. Communication, teamwork, managing your time and managing yourself belong to almost every role, whatever the sector or level, which makes them the practical core of the term. If you want a short checklist, start here. Can you say what you are working on and when it will be done? Can you keep several tasks moving without one of them quietly slipping? Can you find what you need and use it without being walked through every step? Each yes is a piece of the definition you already meet. ### Mindsets and work ethic: how you approach the work The fourth area describes how you approach work rather than what you can do: motivation, commitment, willingness to learn and the ability to stay steady under pressure. It is the area most often mistaken for character. In practice it is concrete and visible: starting a dull task without being chased, asking how something works instead of guessing, keeping your head when a deadline moves forward by two days. Placing work ethic and mindsets beside social skills, as Indiana's framework does, makes the point clearly. How you approach the work is part of the definition, not decoration on top of it, and like the other three areas it is built through practice. ## Same skills, different labels, and what the term leaves out Employability skills, soft skills, transferable skills, work-readiness skills, career-readiness skills, generic skills: these labels overlap almost entirely. Education, government workforce bodies and employers have each coined their own word for much the same set, so a job ad asking for strong soft skills and a course module on employability are pointing at the same thing. There is nothing extra to learn for each new label. Two things sit outside the term. The first is the technical knowledge tied to a particular role, such as accounting standards, a programming language or clinical procedures. Those are [hard skills](/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/what-s-the-difference-between-hard-and-soft-skills/): learned, relatively easy to measure, and often what gets you considered in the first place. The second is employability as a whole. Employability is your broader capacity to get a job, keep it and move to the next one, and it is shaped by qualifications, experience and skills together. Employability skills are the transferable part of that capacity, and the part you can build most directly, whatever your degree. ## How to tell whether you already have them Because employability skills are transferable, your evidence for them does not have to come from work related to your degree. A part-time job, a placement, a volunteer role, a sports team, a group project with a hard deadline: each of these asks you to communicate, cooperate, manage your time and show up reliably, and each can prove it. The catch is that these skills are harder to measure than technical ones, so simply naming them proves very little. "Good communicator" and "team player" [on a résumé](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/how-to-list-soft-skills-on-resume/) tell an employer that you know the words. What makes the claim credible is a concrete example: what the situation was, what you did, and what changed because you did it. A useful exercise is to take each of the four areas above and write down one moment that shows it. Where a solid example comes easily, you have both the skill and the evidence. Where you struggle, you have found the part worth practicing next. Your own impression is a weak guide here, because everyday behavior is the hardest thing to see in yourself. A [structured check of your skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) gives you something firmer than a hunch, and whatever it shows is a starting point rather than a verdict, since each of these skills can be learned. ## The skills that make the definition something you can show Ask what a new manager or colleague would actually notice in your first month. Not your categories, but your conduct. The answers tend to gather around how you behave, how you get things across, and how you work with others toward a shared result. **Professional Behaviors** is the most concrete layer of the definition. Being on time, treating everyone with the same respect, staying open when the way things are done changes, keeping confidential information confidential, getting administrative tasks done without complaint: a large part of what "employable" means in practice is knowing how a workplace works in this sense. These norms are seldom taught, which is exactly why they count. You can recognize them in yourself, and build them, in a part-time job, a placement or a group project right now. **Communication** covers more distinct behaviors than any other part of the definition, which is why it pays to break it down: putting the main point first, listening to understand rather than to reply, writing an email that is short and clear, speaking up in a meeting when you have something to add, and disagreeing without damaging the relationship. Seen this way, communication is not a talent you either have or lack. It is a set of specific habits, each one practicable and each one something you can point to with an example. **Teamwork** is the one you probably assume you already have, since group projects seem to prove it. At work it asks for more: putting the team's purpose ahead of personal credit, building trust by doing what you committed to, disagreeing about the topic rather than the person, and then committing to a decision you argued against. Those are the behaviors that turn a phrase on a résumé into something you can actually back up. Which of the three would a new manager notice first in you, and which would they notice missing? That question has a concrete answer. The free Job Skills Test scores each of them, as part of a wider set of **twelve work skills**, so you can [see which one to strengthen](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before it matters most. Wherever you score lower, the skill is still learnable, and the result tells you where practice pays off first. ## Recognizing these skills in your own work Chances are you have done more of this than you would think to list on an application. If you have been the one in a group project who wrote down what was agreed and who was doing what, you were practicing communication and teamwork at the same time. If you have covered a shift and left a clear handover note, that was professional behavior in its most practical form. None of these skills is fixed. The ones that feel weaker now are simply the ones you have had less practice at, and building them does not require becoming a different person. Left alone, a gap in one of them tends to surface just when a role starts asking more of you, and spotting it early turns it into something you work on deliberately rather than discover under pressure. What remains is to put your own name next to the definition. ## See where your skills stand Holding the definition up against your own skills is the natural next move. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it shows where you stand on all twelve, and which ones will make the biggest difference to the applications and the first job ahead of you. **[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? Employability skills are the non-technical skills behind how you work with others and manage yourself at work. See the four areas they cover and how to show yours. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Professional Behaviors. It also relates to Communication, Teamwork. ### 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/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/definition-of-employability-skills/ Preferred summary: "Employability skills are the non-technical skills behind how you work with others and manage yourself at work. See the four areas they cover and how to show yours." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.