# Employability and Jobs: What Gets You Hired and Keeps You Employed Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/employability-jobs/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/employability-jobs.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 means getting a job, keeping it and moving on. Learn what employers look for, how to show it with little experience, and what keeps you hired. ## Key facts - Title: Employability and Jobs: What Gets You Hired and Keeps You Employed - Category: Employability - Primary skill: Professional Behaviors - Related skills: Communication, Building Self-Awareness - Primary keyword: employability jobs - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/employability-jobs/ ## What this page covers - Employability means getting a job, keeping it and moving on. Learn what employers look for, how to show it with little experience, and what keeps you hired. - Practical guidance for employability jobs - How this topic connects to Professional Behaviors ## Detailed explanation Employability is what gets you jobs and keeps you in them: the capability to get hired, stay employed and move to new work when you need to. Employers judge it on more than a degree. They look for evidence of how you work with people, how you conduct yourself, and whether your skills keep growing. If your grades are solid but your work history is short, that can feel like being measured against a standard nobody spelled out. It is less vague than it looks, and most of it can be learned. Employability works on four separate fronts, and each one is judged on something different. ## What employability means for the jobs you want The most useful definition comes from a 1998 framework by Hillage and Pollard for the UK's Institute for Employment Studies. It treats employability as three capabilities, not one: getting a first job, keeping it (which includes moving between roles inside the same organization), and finding new work when you need to. It adds a fourth concern, the quality of the work you are able to get. In other words, the question is not settled on the day you receive an offer. The same capability is tested again every time your situation changes. The framework is just as clear about what employability is made of. There are your assets: what you know, what you can do, and your attitudes. There is how you deploy them, meaning how you manage your career and look for work. There is how you present them, through applications, interviews and the experience you can point to. And there is context: your personal circumstances and the state of the labor market, which you only partly control. Assets alone don't make anyone employable. They count when you use them and when an employer can see them. If your experience is thin, deployment and presentation are where you can make the fastest progress, because they depend on what you do next rather than on years you haven't worked yet. In the UK, the word also names a field of work in its own right: employment advisers, job coaches and the organizations that help other people into jobs. The four fronts below are about the capability itself, meaning what makes you hireable and what keeps you that way. ### Getting a first job This is the front most people mean when they talk about employability, and its defining feature is that you are judged before anyone has seen you work. An employer can't watch you handle a deadline or a difficult customer before hiring you, so they look for evidence instead. According to NACE's Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update, the evidence employers most want to see from college candidates is teamwork, problem-solving and effective communication, and more than half of them had ten or more skills on their wish list. That makes interpersonal skills a hiring criterion rather than a pleasant extra, and it means the proof matters as much as the skill. Experience is the proof employers trust most. NACE reports that when two candidates are otherwise equally qualified, employers overwhelmingly choose the one with internship experience. The reason is simple: experience shows that a candidate already knows how to behave in a workplace. If you haven't had an internship, the evidence can come from elsewhere. The skills that make someone employable [carry across industries and roles](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/transferable-skills-for-jobs/) in a way technical knowledge usually doesn't. How you treat people, how clearly you communicate and how you work with others transfer from a restaurant shift, a volunteer role or a group project into any workplace. [Describe what you did](/knowledge/employability/soft-skills-to-write-in-cv/), who you did it with and what came of it, and the skill shows without needing a label. If you aren't sure which of your skills would hold up as evidence, it is worth taking a moment to [see which skills stand out](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), so your next application leads with the strongest ones. Attitudes count here too. Hillage and Pollard list them among your assets, alongside knowledge and skills, and they are visible from the first conversation, long before you have any track record. > The only reason I was hired — and my boss told me this too — was that I was passionate about it. I came in with so much energy and such a strong will to get out there and do something great. You can learn a lot of things, but you can't really learn to be motivated. That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, describing what his manager told him about a job he landed with no relevant experience. One manager's reasoning is not a rule for how hiring works, but it shows how much attitude can carry when experience is thin. ### Keeping work and moving within an organization Once you are hired, the evidence changes. Nobody rereads your application. What counts now is how you conduct yourself day to day, because that is what your manager and colleagues actually see. This front covers staying employed and also moving between roles inside the same organization, and both depend on the view people form of you over months, not on what you said in the interview. Reliability, respect and a willingness to learn, the same attitudes that helped you get in, are what decide whether you are trusted with more. That is good news if your experience is thin, because conduct is something you can demonstrate from your first week. ### Moving to new work when needed Employability and employment are not the same thing. You can hold a job while your employability quietly falls, because your skills and relationships have stopped developing. You can also be out of work and still be highly employable. This front is about the next move, whether you choose it or a role ends without warning. Holding a job does not keep you employable on its own. What does is whether your assets kept growing while you were in it. In practice, that means treating your first job as a place to keep building skills and [asking for feedback](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/ask-for-feedback-at-work/), not as the finish line of the job search. ### Getting work that fits The last dimension is quality. Hillage and Pollard point out that people may be able to obtain work, but work below their level of skill, or in low-paid, undesirable or unsustainable jobs. Being employable means more than being employed somewhere. For a graduate, that shifts the question from "can I get any job?" to "can I get work that uses what I offer?" Answering it requires knowing what you offer in the first place: the things you are [genuinely good at](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-identify-your-strengths/), not just the things you have done. ## What makes you worth hiring and worth keeping So are you job-ready? There is no single line to cross. On the first front, it means having a few skills you can back with evidence. On the others, it means habits you keep building once you are in. Look back across all four and the same few things keep deciding the outcome. It is rarely the qualification itself. It is what you do around it every working day: how you conduct yourself, how your work reaches other people, and how well you know what you bring. **Professional Behaviors** are the evidence you can offer before you have much of a track record. Being on time and prepared, treating everyone with the same respect whatever their title, looking for what works before pointing out what doesn't, following the policies and getting the administrative tasks done without complaint: colleagues register all of it, mostly without noticing that they do. They register the opposite just as quickly, whether that is staying passive in meetings, acting as if you know better or settling into constant criticism. None of this is a personality type. These are specific behaviors anyone can practice, and they are what keep you employed and recommended long after the hiring decision. **Communication** is what you are judged on before anyone sees your work: the email that carries your application, the interview conversation, the first team meeting. Once you are hired, it is how you keep asking until you understand what someone needs, put your main point first, speak up when something matters and disagree without creating friction. None of it requires eloquence or charisma. Plain, clear and brief is the standard, together with a genuine interest in understanding the other person, and you can show all of that from day one, however short your work history is. **Building Self-Awareness** starts with knowing what you already offer. That means your natural strengths, the things you are genuinely good at rather than merely competent at, so you can aim at jobs that fit and describe your value in a way an employer believes. After you are hired, it continues as a feedback habit: asking for specific, future-focused advice, weighing it and acting on it. Feedback is how you find the blind spots other people already see, and how you keep improving while you are employed. You don't need a personality test for this, and you don't need to fix every weakness before you apply. Self-awareness is easier with something concrete to work from. The Job Skills Test gives you that for these three and for **nine other work skills** besides, so you can [see where to grow next](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), which is the part of employability that keeps working for you after the offer. Each of them can be learned, so whatever the results show is a starting point, not a verdict. ## The evidence you already have You have probably been tested on some of this already, even if nobody called it employability. If a manager has ever asked you to show a new starter the ropes, or you were the one who sent the group project the message that finally got everyone moving, someone was responding to skills you had already built. The ones you haven't built yet say nothing permanent about who you are. They are behaviors you can grow into, starting with whichever matters most for the job you want next, and you stay yourself while you do it. They also tend to count for more with each move you make. A second job is judged on what you have built since the first, so starting early leaves less to chance. What remains is knowing where to begin. ## Start with a clear picture All that's missing is a clear starting point. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of twelve work skills, covering how you work with others and how you manage yourself at work. In 7 minutes it shows where you stand on each one, and which ones will do the most for the jobs you are aiming at. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, takes 7 minutes, with 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 means getting a job, keeping it and moving on. Learn what employers look for, how to show it with little experience, and what keeps you hired. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Professional Behaviors. It also relates to Communication, Building Self-Awareness. ### 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/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/employability-jobs/ Preferred summary: "Employability means getting a job, keeping it and moving on. Learn what employers look for, how to show it with little experience, and what keeps you hired." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.