# What Employability Really Means, and How to Build Yours Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/employability/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/employability.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 is your capability to get a job, keep it and move on when you need to. Learn its four parts and how to build and show the skills employers want. ## Key facts - Title: What Employability Really Means, and How to Build Yours - Category: Employability - Primary skill: Professional Behaviors - Related skills: Communication, Teamwork - Primary keyword: employability - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/employability/ ## What this page covers - Employability is your capability to get a job, keep it and move on when you need to. Learn its four parts and how to build and show the skills employers want. - Practical guidance for employability - How this topic connects to Professional Behaviors ## Detailed explanation Employability is your capability to get a job, keep it, and move into new work when you need to. It rests on more than a degree: on the skills and attitudes you bring, how well you direct and show them to employers, and the job market you meet. Most of it can be learned. If you are close to graduating, or a year or two into your first job, you have probably heard that a degree alone guarantees less than it used to, and then been left to guess what else counts. That uncertainty is fair. It is also fixable, because employability has a shape, and once you can see its parts you can tell which ones you already have and which ones need work. ## What employability actually means In a 1998 study for the UK Department for Education and Employment, Hillage and Pollard defined employability as the capability to gain initial employment, maintain it, and obtain new employment if required. The definition is deliberately wider than a hiring decision. It covers three moments: getting in, staying in, and moving on. That matters more than it first appears. It is natural to focus on the first moment, because the application, the interview and the offer are where the pressure feels sharpest. But the same capability is tested again a few months into the job, when it becomes clear whether you are someone the team wants to keep, and again years later, when you want or need to move. Employability is the thread through all three, not a hurdle you clear once. ## The four parts of employability Being good at your subject is one part of being employable, but only one. Hillage and Pollard break employability into four components that interact: what you have, how you direct it, how you show it, and the circumstances you do it in. The point of the model is that assets alone do not make anyone employable. They have to be deployed and presented, and the surrounding context shapes what they are worth. That is why a capable graduate can still struggle: the gap often sits in how their strengths are directed and shown, not in the strengths themselves. ### Employability assets Your assets are your knowledge, your skills and your attitudes. A degree speaks mainly to the first. The second and third are where many early-career people feel least sure of themselves, partly because the behaviors that matter most at work are rarely taught in school. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), employers reviewing new graduates' résumés for entry-level roles look for evidence of [teamwork, problem-solving and communication skills](/knowledge/employability/soft-skills-employers-want/). These carry across almost any role, which is why employers screen for them regardless of the specific job. The word that matters is evidence. Your subject counts, but what separates one candidate from another is being able to show those behaviors in practice. Attitudes belong here too. Showing respect, staying open to change, delivering what you said you would: these are part of your assets as much as anything on a transcript, and they are learnable behaviors, not personality. If you are unsure which of them you already bring, guessing is a weak basis for an application. [An honest read on your workplace skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) gives you a firmer starting point, and every gap it shows is one you can work on. ### Deployment Deployment is about using what you have: knowing [which roles suit what you bring](/knowledge/setting-goals/what-career-best-suits-me/), finding them, and pursuing them deliberately. Hillage and Pollard place career management and job search skills here. It is a separate component for a reason. A person with strong assets can still be held back by weak deployment, applying everywhere and to nothing in particular, or aiming at roles that fit someone else's idea of a good career rather than their own strengths. ### Presentation Presentation is how your assets become visible to an employer: through [your résumé](/knowledge/employability/soft-skills-to-write-in-cv/), your interviews and your experience. This is where the translation problem lives. Assets that are never demonstrated do not count in hiring, so the work is turning what you did in education and early jobs (group projects, part-time work, volunteering, student roles) into concrete evidence of how you behave at work. If that translation is the part that stalls you, you are not the only one wrestling with it. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described the same knot: > 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 question has a practical answer: translate the behavior, not the subject matter. The literature search still matters, but what an employer is trying to see through it is how you work. A thesis shows you can plan a long piece of work and deliver it on time. A group project shows what you did when a teammate went quiet two days before the deadline. A weekend job shows you showed up reliably and dealt with an annoyed customer without making things worse. For each experience, name the situation, what you did, and what changed because of it. That is evidence; a list of adjectives is not. ### Context The fourth component sits largely outside your control. McQuaid and Lindsay, writing in *Urban Studies* in 2005, describe employability as three interrelated parts: individual factors such as your skills, attitudes and job-seeking behavior; personal circumstances such as your social networks and access to resources; and external factors such as the labor market and wider economic conditions. In their view, employability sits between you and the labor market, not inside you alone. That distinction is useful in both directions. It stops you from blaming yourself for an economy you cannot change, and it stops you from waiting for the market to improve instead of working on the part you can control. Your skills, your attitudes and the way you go about looking for work are yours to develop, and that is where effort pays. ## Why employed and employable are not the same thing Employability is a capability, not a status. You can hold a job and still have little ability to keep it or to move on when you need to, and you can be between jobs while being highly employable, for example when the labor market is weak. Two practical consequences follow. A slow job search is not, on its own, proof that you lack something. And landing a first job does not settle the question for the rest of your career: the "maintain" and "obtain new employment" parts of the definition keep running long after the offer letter. ## How employability is built The University of Newcastle's careers service describes employability not as a set of skills but as a range of experiences and attributes developed over time. That is the most encouraging thing about it. Employability accumulates through the experiences you choose and what you take from them, which means you can build it deliberately, starting from wherever you are now. In practice that comes down to three habits. Choose experiences that make you work with other people under some real pressure: a part-time job, a student committee role, a volunteering project with a deadline. Notice what you actually did in them, at the level of behavior rather than job title, such as how you handled the disagreement, the late delivery, the customer who would not calm down. And keep turning those moments into evidence you could [describe in an interview](/knowledge/teamwork/teamwork-examples-for-interview/), so that by the time you need it, the translation is already done. ## The skills that make you worth hiring and worth keeping Look back across the four parts and notice what keeps coming up. Employers want evidence of how you work with others; presentation means showing it; keeping a job depends on it day after day. Three skills sit close to the center of all that. **Professional Behaviors** is what turns being qualified into being worth keeping. It covers the attitudes that make someone easy to work with (respect for everyone, humility, genuine interest in colleagues, openness to change, being on time) and steering clear of the passive, negative or arrogant habits that quietly undo a good start. None of this asks you to conform or hide who you are. These are behaviors you can practice from your first day, and they show up in every job you will ever hold. **Communication** runs through every step of getting in and staying in: the application email, the interview conversation, your first meetings, the moment you need to disagree or apologize. You do not need charisma or an outgoing personality to be good at it. What makes the difference is whether you are clear and direct, put the main point first, and genuinely try to understand the other person, habits you can build in ordinary emails and conversations long before anything big depends on them. **Teamwork** matters because hardly any job is done alone. Workplace teamwork asks for more than school group work did: putting the team's common purpose ahead of personal credit, building trust by doing what you said you would, and disagreeing openly on the substance before committing to what the team decides. Being a good team member does not mean being agreeable or avoiding conflict. It means being someone others can rely on, which is exactly what makes you valuable in the next team, too. The Job Skills Test measures exactly these behaviors, so it is the quickest way to [see which one needs practice](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). Because it covers **twelve work skills** rather than these three alone, it will also surface strengths you may not have thought to put on a résumé. Every one of them can be developed. ## What this means for you Some of this may already sound like you. If you have ever been the person in a group project who quietly rebuilt the timeline after someone dropped out, or the one at a part-time job who calmed a frustrated customer instead of escalating, you have already practiced the behaviors employers look for. You may just not have named them yet. The rest can be built, at your own pace and in your own way; becoming more employable does not require becoming someone else. It is worth starting early, because the weight of these skills grows with every move you make, from a first role to the ones that follow. What helps most now is knowing which of them to build first. ## See where your employability stands One step remains: finding out where you are starting from. The **free** Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your work skills. It shows how you score across all twelve, and which ones will make the biggest difference to getting in, staying in and moving on. **[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 is your capability to get a job, keep it and move on when you need to. Learn its four parts and how to build and show the skills employers want. ### 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/employability/ Preferred summary: "Employability is your capability to get a job, keep it and move on when you need to. Learn its four parts and how to build and show the skills employers want." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.