# The Top 10 Employability Skills, and How They Fit Together Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/top-10-employability-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/top-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 top 10 employability skills employers look for, grouped into four kinds: working with others, managing yourself, judgment, and initiative. How to build each. ## Key facts - Title: The Top 10 Employability Skills, and How They Fit Together - Category: Employability - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Teamwork, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: top 10 employability skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/top-10-employability-skills/ ## What this page covers - The top 10 employability skills employers look for, grouped into four kinds: working with others, managing yourself, judgment, and initiative. How to build each. - Practical guidance for top 10 employability skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The top 10 employability skills are communication, teamwork, working with your manager, professional behaviors, time management, resilience, self-awareness, decision-making, influence and initiative, and networking. Together they cover how you work with others, how you manage yourself, how you make judgment calls, and how you move things forward, which is why employers in every field look for them. Good grades rarely settle the question on their own, and many people sense that before their first application goes out. None of these ten is a talent you either have or lack. They also make far more sense as four groups than as a list, and the group you are weakest in tells you where to start. ## What makes a skill an employability skill Your degree shows what you know. Employability skills show how you will work: how you deal with colleagues and managers, and how you manage yourself when nobody is setting the timetable for you. They decide whether a qualified person gets hired, and then whether that person does well once inside. NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers, describes employability through eight career readiness competencies, developed with a task force of university and corporate members. They include oral and written communication, teamwork and collaboration, critical thinking and problem solving, leadership, professionalism and work habits, digital technology, and career management. Apart from digital technology, every item on that list describes how you behave rather than what you studied. That is useful to know, because it is the vocabulary job ads and interviewers tend to use, and because behavior is something you can practice. ## The top 10 employability skills, in four groups The ten skills are not ten unrelated items. They fall into four kinds: skills for working with others, skills for managing yourself, the judgment employers call problem-solving, and the proactive skills that build on all three. Seeing them this way makes it easier to spot what kind of gap you have, if any. ### Interpersonal skills: working with others Communication, teamwork, and working with your manager belong here. Teamwork and communication sit at or near the top of employer surveys year after year, and for good reason: almost every job puts you inside a team, and almost every task involves explaining something to someone. In practice, communication means stating your main point first, keeping it brief, and listening until you understand what the other person actually needs. Teamwork, as NACE defines it, includes being able to negotiate and [manage conflict](/knowledge/teamwork/conflict-teamwork/), not just get along. That means disagreeing about the work without making it personal, and then committing to the team's decision even when you argued for something else. Working with your manager rounds out the group: treating the relationship as a partnership, keeping your manager informed, and agreeing early on what a good result looks like. ### Self-management skills: how you run yourself Professional behaviors, time management, resilience, and self-awareness make up the largest group. These are the signals colleagues read in a new hire before any expertise has been shown. Work ethic shows up mainly as professional behavior, and it matters: in NACE's Job Outlook 2020 survey, 80.4% of employers said they look for it on a resume. NACE's professionalism competency spells out what it looks like: acting with integrity and accountability, being present and prepared, and paying attention to detail. Time management is the matching skill for your workload, because at work priorities come from other people and shift without warning. Resilience is how quickly you recover when work is sent back or a mistake becomes visible. Self-awareness covers knowing your own strengths and weaknesses, which NACE includes in its career management competency, and taking feedback well enough to learn from it. ### Judgment: the skill employers call problem-solving The eighth skill, decision-making, is the one employers usually name problem-solving, and it is the most consistently sought of all. In NACE's Job Outlook 2020 survey, 91.2% of employers looked for problem-solving skills on a resume. According to NACE's Job Outlook 2024, problem-solving and the ability to work in a team again topped the list, while GPA continued to fall in importance. In a first job, this rarely means cracking big analytical puzzles. It means everyday judgment calls: knowing which decisions are yours to make, using facts rather than hunches, getting a second opinion from someone more experienced, and accepting a good-enough answer instead of waiting for a perfect one. Employers weigh it above grades because grades say little about how you will handle a problem nobody has graded before. ### Proactive skills: moving things forward The last two, influence and initiative and networking, build on the other three groups. Employers often call the first one leadership. In NACE's Job Outlook 2016 survey, leadership was the single most sought attribute, at 80.1%; in 2020, 72.5% of employers still listed it. For a new hire, it does not mean managing people. It means [taking on work without being prompted](/knowledge/influence/show-initiative-at-work/), volunteering to prepare the agenda or write up the notes, and following through so that people trust you with more. Networking belongs here too. NACE counts networking to build relationships as part of career management, and it works best when you [build relationships before you need them](/knowledge/networking/networking-for-students/), by being useful to people rather than asking them for favors. Both skills weigh more as a career progresses, because the further you go, the more of your work depends on other people choosing to back your ideas. ## Why the exact ranking matters less than the cluster Every year's employer survey produces a slightly different top ten. In 2016 leadership came first; in 2020 problem-solving led, followed by teamwork at 86.3%, work ethic, analytical skills at 79.4%, and written communication at 77.5%; in 2024 problem-solving and teamwork topped the list again. The order moves. The cluster underneath it does not: teamwork, communication, problem-solving, leadership, and work ethic keep coming back. That has a practical consequence. When nine in ten employers look for a skill, it is not something that makes you stand out. It is something that screens you out if you cannot show it. A memorized ranking will not help you; evidence across the whole cluster will. This is also where many graduates feel the gap between their education and the job ad most sharply. If that sounds familiar, you are in good company. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work told us: > One thing is what the university says the degree qualifies you for. Another is whether I, as a student, can honestly feel I can do those things when I apply. That gap is real, and it is also the most fixable part of an application. Your degree does its job; these skills are the part you add yourself, and they can be built and shown long before your first full-time role. ## How to build and show employability skills These skills are learnable behaviors, not personality traits. They are rarely taught directly in education, which is why so many people pick them up by trial and error once they start work, and why some never quite do. You do not have to wait for that. You can develop them deliberately, through practice, feedback, and a little reflection, wherever you are now. A few principles make this work: - Work on one group at a time. If your interpersonal skills are strong but your time management slips under pressure, start there rather than trying to improve all ten at once. - Practice where you already are. A part-time job, a project group, a volunteer role, or a sports team gives you real situations in which to try something new and see what happens. - Ask for specific feedback. Ask someone who sees you work what you should do differently next time, then try again. - [Turn each skill into evidence](/knowledge/employability/soft-skills-to-write-in-cv/). Naming a skill on a resume says little. A specific situation, what you did, and what came of it is what makes a claim of teamwork or communication credible to an employer. If you are not sure which group is your weakest, [mapping your own skill gaps](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) first keeps you from spending months practicing what you can already do, and points you to the one group where a little effort pays off most. ## The skills a new colleague notices first Of the ten, some take months to show. Your judgment and your initiative become visible only once people have seen you handle real work. Three others are on display from your first email, your first meeting, and your first week. **Communication** is how every other skill reaches an employer. Your application, your interview answers, and your first messages to a new team are samples of it, and they are judged before you have done any real work. The habits that matter most early are small and practicable: put your main point first, keep it short, and make sure you have understood what was asked before you answer. **Teamwork** is where your reliability gets tested. A new team quickly learns whether you do what you commit to, share what you know, and keep disagreements about the work rather than the person. Group projects and part-time jobs give you a place to practice exactly those behaviors, and to collect examples you can tell in an interview. **Professional Behaviors** set the tone of every first impression. Being on time, prepared, respectful to everyone regardless of their role, and willing to do the less exciting tasks properly is what colleagues use to decide whether you are someone they can rely on. None of it requires experience, only attention. All three are habits, so all three can be practiced this week. The Job Skills Test gives you [a measured read on each](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), which turns a vague sense of "probably fine" into a clear starting point, and it covers **nine more work skills** besides, confidence and goal-setting among them. ## Where your experience already counts Some of this may already show up in how you work. If you have been the person in a project group who wrote down who was doing what by when, or covered a shift for a colleague without being asked, you have practiced teamwork and initiative in a real setting. That is the raw material employers are looking for. None of these skills asks you to become someone else. They are behaviors, so a gap is simply something you have not learned yet, and you can choose which one to work on next. They also count for more with each step forward, as more of what you achieve depends on working through other people, which is a reason to begin now while the stakes are still low. Knowing which of the four groups is already working for you makes the next step easy to choose. ## See which of the ten you can already rely on The only thing left is to find 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 skills, the ten above included, and which ones would make the biggest difference to your next application. **[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 top 10 employability skills employers look for, grouped into four kinds: working with others, managing yourself, judgment, and initiative. How to build each. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Teamwork, Professional Behaviors. ### 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/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/top-10-employability-skills/ Preferred summary: "The top 10 employability skills employers look for, grouped into four kinds: working with others, managing yourself, judgment, and initiative. How to build each." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.